Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

34 Egalitarianism On Its Own
tithing and other religion-based charity, potlatches, to egalitarian division
rules for the catch of the hunt, have cropped up in human history
with such regularity and under such diverse circumstances that one
is tempted to place them among Talcott Parsons’ (1964) evolutionary
universals: social institutions that confer such extensive benefits upon
their users that they regularly appear and reappear in the course of history
in otherwise diverse societies. The evolutionary viability of sharing
institutions and of the motivations which support them counsels
against those who have written off egalitarianism as an idea whose
time has come and gone.
Consider one of these institutions, the practice that the Peruvian
highlanders call sunay whereby herders give a llama to a fellow herdsman
in need. Economists and biologists might doubt that this practice
would be evolutionarily viable, as it appears to confer no benefit on
the giver while imposing substantial costs. Yet sunay and the associated
practice kuyaq of confirming ritual status of family membership
on needy individuals persisted over centuries. Seeking to solve the
mystery of this evolutionarily improbable form of generosity, Kent
Flannery, Joyce Marcus and Robert Reynolds (1989) studied the demography
of the llama herds and then simulated the evolution of the herds
under various sharing rules including the lack of sharing of any kind.
They found that:
… the advantages of widespread generosity in sunay outweigh the
advantages of cheating or ignoring those who are not one’s kin. …
the custom of sunay, once adopted, might have been strongly
selected for at the group level. In our models, herd systems that practice
it have larger and far more stable herds after 100 years than systems
without it. … universal adherence to sunay – even if it includes
giving good breeding stock to non-kin – can make it possible for one’s
children to pass on more animals to one’s grandchildren. It does that
by ensuring that there will be lots of other herds around from which
the children and grandchildren can get sunay when they need it.
(202)
Sunay, aided by the fictive kin generated by kuyaq, is practiced on an
extended scale: ‘in the context of a ritual, [kuyaq] converts non-kin
into kin and makes possible the universal extension of sunay’ (203).
Flannery et al. conclude that unlike other species, humans
can use culture to create fictive kin towards whom they behave
altruistically,…and there may be situations in which such ex-tensions