Social networks and inequality in small-scale subsistence societies

Résumé

The evolution of inequality is a topic of perennial interest across the social, behavioural and evolutionary sciences. Major advances have been made on the cultural and ecological conditions, and individual differences that produce inequality in access to social, informational and material resources. Researchers have begun to explore the ways in which the patterning of social interactions and relationships (i.e., social networks) can act alongside cultural and ecological conditions to produce or constrain different forms of inequality. However, the mechanisms through which social networks produce inequality remain unclear. I will present an interdisciplinary approach for understanding inequality, and will outline recent methodological advances in social network analysis for empirically testing this theory. To do this, I will first demonstrate how cooperation networks are structured by—and create differences in—social status among the Tsimané of Lowland Bolivia, and that reputation guides choices during network-structured field experiments in four rural Colombian communities. I will then outline preliminary evidence from the ENDOW project (a large, comparative study of inequality in subsistence societies), which shows that individuals in more central networks positions—and those with greater access to materially wealthy others—have greater material wealth. Together, this body of work hints at how cultural and ecological conditions can produce distinct network structure, and how the structure of such networks have the potential to create and maintain different levels of inequality across these diverse conditions.