Describing historical events without referring to the types of society they occur in is like an artist drawing the human figure in motion with no understanding of how the skeleton or the muscles of the body interact, to create certain possibilities and constraints to movement. History can only occur through the construction of relatively stable socio-cultural systems. A natural catastrophe in a hunting-and-gathering society will not have the same impact as it will in an industrial capitalist society. It is impossible to make sense of ecological crises, inventions, and famines without a prior understanding of the type of social structure they are impacting. World history occurs in concrete social systems - hunting and gathering societies, simple and complex horticultural villages, nomadic herding societies, and agricultural states in addition to industrial capitalist societies. There are qualitative differences between bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and state societies. Yet all societies have to adapt to their ecological settings and develop systems for producing and reproducing their existence across generations.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris (1977, 1979, 1988) has divided all social systems into three subsystems - the social infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. These subsystems enable human beings to reproduce their existence. To begin with, the ecological setting frames the conditions under which societies are built. Whether people find themselves in steppes, deserts, jungles, or plains affects the kind of soils, plants, and animals that are available as resources as well as the climate and topography. All these factors affect how hard people work and how well they eat. Additionally, the size of the population interacts with the ecological setting to determine whether people will migrate or stay in the same place.
Activities in the social infrastructure involve the most immediate necessities in food production - whether people will hunt, gather, fish or plant. Once all of this is established, people must discover the process of how they can work most efficiently, in order to gain the most yield with the least amount of effort. To do this an elementary division of labor is established which includes designing tools, devising ways of harnessing energy, and determining the length of the workday.
Producing goods, however, is only the beginning. There must be methods of determining out who gets what, when, where and how. Thus, a primary aspect of the second dimension of a society - its structure - is its economy, or system for circulating the exchange of goods and services once they are produced. Further, the economy involves decisions about how much gets produced. In societies with rank and stratified social relations, the asymmetrical ratio of distribution is justified by status, prestige, and the ownership or non-ownership of property.
The second major department within the social structure is a society's politics. Politics in its original sense means the "policy" governing society in two senses: projecting the future direction of the society and maintaining and regulating the existing social institutions - that is, sustaining order. The establishment of social policy is rarely a smooth process. Especially in rank and stratified societies, different subgroups within society cooperate, compete, and struggle for political power. The political and the economic systems are interrelated, and both concern the public world.
As the saying goes, "man does not live by bread alone." People in all societies seek meaning about what they are doing. Meaning-making systems include science, art, law, and sacred systems - which, according to Harris, more often than not serve to justify in people's minds what they are already practicing in their work. These meaning-making systems can also inspire people to look beyond the mundane necessities of working, eating, and breeding. This dimension is called the society's superstructure and is often simply referred to as its "culture."
For our purposes, the most important part of Harris' description is his claim about how these three subsystems interact over time. When most of us are taught about world history we are presented with a picture that presupposes that social change proceeds from the top down, moving from the social superstructure and descending to the structure and infrastructure. This is an "idealist" presentation of history, in that it assumes the social world changes because of extraordinary ideas, knowledge systems, or morals.
Harris argues that this is wrong. Social evolution is rarely determined by people's values and ideas - whether they be sacred or scientific. In fact, in nearly every instance social change begins with a crisis of population pressure and resource depletion. If the crisis is bad enough and the society doesn't become fragmented (people abandoning it or joining other societies), people will by trial and error develop new technologies and economic-political systems that temporarily relieve the crisis. The superstructure is usually the most conservative dimension of society and the last to change. In Harris's model, the social infrastructure and structure are like the arms of a galaxy whirling very quickly. The superstructure is like the galactic core, whose rate of movement is slower. Harris backs up his claim with evidence that hunting-gathering, horticultural, and agricultural societies all change from the bottom up. Harris is a materialist. I am convinced that tangible, biophysical, and technological-economic processes determine beliefs, knowledge systems, and values far more often than the reverse.
This linear description of the movement from infrastructure to structure to superstructure does not mean that the superstructure is powerless and doesn't have any influence. It just means its influence is comparatively weak. In reality, all three dimensions are interpenetrating. But the dynamics are not equally weighted. Lastly, this description is not meant to suggest that in practice people in societies first build the infrastructure, then the structure, and finally the superstructure. All three subsystems are built co-extensively in time. But as they are building all three subsystems, each subsystem is not affecting people's material life equally. The infrastructure and structure of society are impacting and determining people's lives more forcefully.
What do the dimensions of human society have to do with history? History is the long-term, irreversible, and accumulating result of the production and reproduction of the three dimensions of society as they evolve from hunter-gatherers, simple and complex horticulture societies, the agricultural states, to herding, to agricultural states to industrial capitalist societies. Historical events do not acquire meaning unless we first know: what kind of society is it? Which social class, race or gender is being affected? At what point in history does it happen? The production and reproduction of society is the foundation of history.
History is About Collective Human Activity, not Primarily About Events
How humans shape society: cooperation
Like all other animals, we humans must earn a living in the environment to meet our needs. Each species has a specific activity, a "species activity" unique to itself by which adaptation is accomplished (for example, building dams is the species activity of beavers). All animals work - i.e., they expend energy in a focused way over time in order to survive and reproduce. But the overwhelming majority of animals do not deliberately cooperate with other members of their own species, except in caring for their young. They complete all processes of work essentially alone. The simple biological strategy of most other animals is to graze, forage, or chase down prey in solitude.
Considered in isolation, without society or culture, and relying only on physical prowess, a human being is a mediocre competitor compared to other large-bodied mammals. Other animals can run faster, jump higher, and have greater sensory acuity. It is our social strategies that have made us the dominant large-bodied species on this planet, and these social strategies entail cooperation. It is our ability to cooperate with other human beings that gives us the edge over the rest of the animal kingdom. We cooperate by (a) pooling our resources, (b) creating a division of labor, and (c) working to a common end. Cooperation creates a social whole which is more than the sum of its parts.
Human societies emerged as an adaptive strategy of Homo sapiens to compensate for our physiological mediocrity. But society does far more than help us to survive and reproduce. Society is responsible for completing our humanization and expanding it over the course of history. Cooperation changes human species-activity from work to labor. In laboring, we accept roles. Members of a hunting band agree beforehand that some will join together to frighten the game, while others will wait in ambush. Later, if they have been suc cessful, they will share the kill with other members of the band who have stayed behind at the campsite. After all, having finished consuming the edible parts of their prey, those members who did not participate in the hunt are expected to engage in other roles, such as sewing the carcass and tanning the leather of the animal.
None of these roles, other than that of waiting in ambush, directly leads to biological satisfaction. In fact, the strategy of frightening the game, taken by itself, would be maladaptive: it would probably diminish the chances of a successful outcome. But as a socio-cultural strategy, frightening the game is effective because others have agreed to be waiting for the game when it falls into their trap. This cooperative strategy, and others like it, are so effective that they have enabled our species to dominate the globe.
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