With my background knowledge from both the Leadership 101 and 102 courses, I enjoyed reading “Leadership in small-scale societies: Some implications for theory, research and practice” by Christopher von Rueden and Mark van Vugt. I have not really studied small-scale societies (SSSs) before, so the authors’ work on analyzing these types of societies leadership methods can help us better understand the study of leadership in large-scale societies. This article defines an SSS to have the following characteristics: “small communities, pooling of resources within and across extended families, food production in the absence of significant technology, and few formal institutions governing group life” (979). Looking at SSSs, as the article indicates, gives us an evolutionary on leadership methods since these were the societies humans have lived for the past 200,000 years. The evolutionary perspective gives us the “why” minds have evolved in the ways they did and the “how” they continue to make these decisions.
Some examples of SSSs range across the Amazon, central and eastern Africa, and Southeast Asia. In such an industrialized, fast-paced world, it is crucial to look at SSSs to study human behavior and how the people inhabiting them lead and follow. In my child development class, we watched a film called Babies that tracked the development of four infants across the world; from my observations, the babies in Namibia and Mongolia lived in what seemed like SSSs. In Namibia, the families were very maternal-focused and egalitarian across age groups. Von Rueden and van Vugt indicate that SSSs tend to have egalitarian properties; in both Mongolia and Namibia in Babies, this seemed to be the case in instances such as communication, house duties, and religion. While these were only two SSSs I got to learn about, cross-cultural research suggests that SSSs, especially hunter-gatherer societies, tend to have beneficial leadership rooted in reciprocity, collective action, and coordination. We can analyze the contributions and implications of SSS leadership by looking at large-scale societies (LSSs) in industrialized nations that may have more of a globally-recognized political bureaucracy.
Anna Marston
I similarly found it interesting to read this piece after taking both 101 and 102 with professor von Rueden. It is fascinating how easy it is to connect the behaviors and tendencies of people in small scale societies to those of people in today’s world. I especially found the correlation between physically large people and leadership roles prevalent not only in America, but also places like Russia where propaganda of Vladamir Putin is put our on the media to make him look larger and more intimidating. Similarly, the maternal tendencies that you mentioned are still seen today, but seem to be fading away as more women move away from being the home-keepers. I think this is because it is no longer necessary for survival for the women to do this.
A lot of the aspects of small-scale societies seem very beneficial, but impractical in today’s society. It seems like it is a lot easier to keep leaders accountable in small-scale societies than it is in large-scale societies in large part because of the way people gained benefits in small-scale societies, which you mentioned in your response.