Complex Societies and their Social
Groups and Divisions
Class, Ethnicity, Caste,
Community, and Nation
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Historical Origins of ‘Complexity’:
The Agricultural Revolution
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Began first in Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris
and Euphrates Rivers at about 12,000 BP.
Other regions of early food production include China, India,
Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and Egypt.
Intensive agricultural production allowed for the production
of food SURPLUSES.
This meant that for the first time in history, not all groups
had to be involved in food production or foraging.
It also entailed sedentarization and the growth of population
in towns and later cities.
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Consequences of Food Production
Urbanization
 Growth in the division of labour, including artisans and craft
producers.
 Later division of societies into occupational groups and
classes, e.g. priests, warriors, peasants, and artisans.
 Increase in technological development, e.g.metallurgy,
ceramics, textiles.
 Socio-economic stratification tends to override kinship ties.
 Emergence of alphabets and literacy.
 Development of states, I.e. centralized bureaucratic
organizations that have socio-economic stratification,
standing armies, police forces, and are tax-gathering
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entities.
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The Mesopotamian State
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Early Period: Have systems and subsystems that maintain order:
administration, legislative, judicial, enforcement, fiscal and
military establishments
Middle Period: by 2500 b.c. there is the evidence of slavery.
Beginnings of warfare connected to the origin of slavery; early slaves
were predominantly women from different ethnic groups.
Change from bilateral kinship to patrilineality.
Shift from mother goddess worship to monotheism, c. 1000 B.C.
Division into classes reflected in different laws for various strata of the
population
 Also between various strata of women, who were divided into elite
women, concubines and prostitutes.
 General decline in the status of women after the agricultural
revolution and the rise of states.
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Groups Based on Ideologies of
‘Blood’ or Descent
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Caste: Endogamous groups, occupational specialization,
defined by degrees of status and membership is given at
birth.
Ethnicity: Belief in shared descent related to national origin,
language, or religion.
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Ethnicity is a relational phenomena, people are distinguished
as belonging to one ethnic group due to their differences with
other groups.
A sense of ethnic identity often comes into existence through
political movements mobilized over
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Access to scarce resources
Other strategic reasons
Ethnic belonging, although appearing to be fixed, is often fluid
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Nations and Nationalism
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Sense of shared identity based on common symbols, history,
territory, and/language and culture.
‘Imagined community’: sense of shared descent and destiny,
but not a face-to-face community.
Nations and states often correspond, but not always, e.g. the
Kurds who cross several nation states.
Nations are often based on the culture of a dominant
community in a territory:
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Invented histories and traditions of a shared past.
One people, one culture, one nation.
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Consciousness of ‘Kind’
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Community: sense of shared ‘place’.
Class: Common relation to the means of
production, e.g. distinctions between owners of
enterprises and workers. Also can be defined as
economic strata, defined through occupation
and economic position.
Status Group: shared lifestyle, involves the
deployment of ‘cultural capital’, I.e. the
accumulation of a scarce consumer resources
and knowledge.
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