7 How Do Humans Organize Themselves?
Social Groups
We like to think that the social groups we are members of are somehow innate or natural—something we’re born with. However, research in primate and human groups indicate how social groups are adaptive cultural behaviors. Our primate cousins have various kinds of social groups, many of which are identifiable in human groups as well.
We find pair-bonded species such as golden lion tamarins, who mate for life. Then there are polygynous species like howler monkeys, where one male lives with many females. How are these adaptive behaviors? Golden lion tamarin females usually have multiple births, twins, triplets, and sometimes quadruplets. For the young to survive, it is necessary for the males to be involved in offspring care. This happens more readily when the offspring are biologically the male’s. If the male only has one mate, then he is assured that the offspring he is caring for are his. In evolutionary terms, his energy is going towards the propagation of his own genetics. Polygyny is adaptive when there is a critical resource necessary for breeding success. If a dominant male already has a mate, females may still choose him as a mate because he has already demonstrated his ability to control necessary resources. This is a specific type of polygyny called resource defense polygyny. Of course, the adaptive significance of these types of systems may be more complicated in human groups.
Anthropologists have always been interested in how people organize themselves, particularly in how the forms of organization help the group adapt to local environments, both cultural and natural. Anthropologists in the 19th-century assumed that any type of cultural organization that did not look like the industrial, imperialist societies of the United Kingdom and the United States of America was primitive and inferior (remember—do not take this statement out of historical context; academic disciplines were products of their time). By the turn of the century, Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, advocated for understanding cultural practices within their cultural context. He was not interested in trying to classify cultural groups through hypothetical evolutionary progress, which at the time was laden with notions of superiority and inferiority. Boas is the first anthropologist to espouse a culturally relative approach. He thought the differences between cultures was simply that—differences. He did not view any culture and its people better than others.
Anthropological research has often focused on households as a critical unit of social organization. A household is “a domestic group whose members live together and cooperate on a daily basis in production and share the proceeds of labor and other resources held in common” (Harris and Johnson 2007, 120). This is the social unit where members of the group procured resources to share with one another. It is the unit where they reproduced themselves and taugh