Kin groups mobilise at whatever level matches the scale of the opposing group, so internal rivals combine against a larger external rival and divide again afterwards.
Evans-Pritchard's account of the Nuer in 1940 described a system with no chiefs and no standing groups, in which the unit that acts is generated by the dispute: lineages that feud among themselves unite at the next level up when the opponent is from a different branch. The structure explains how a society can coordinate at large scale without an institution that persists between coordinations.
In practice
- Two teams that fight over budget all year present one position the week an external review is announced.
- A family with a decade-old inheritance quarrel closes ranks the moment an outsider mentions it.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is scale matching: the unit that acts is generated by the dispute, since lineages that fight each other combine against a larger opponent and divide again when it withdraws.
- In its favour
- It gave anthropology a model of order without rulers, and the pattern it describes is recognisable well beyond the societies it was drawn from, including in modern coalition politics.
- Against it
- The classical model has been criticised as an idealisation that fits the ethnographic record less well than its elegance suggests, with later fieldwork finding leadership, permanent alliances and economic ties the model excluded.
- Standing
- The classical model has been criticised as an idealisation that fits the ethnographic record less well than its elegance suggests. Compare the Bedouin proverb of me against my brother.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change