| Go to theory index page, site main page. | Content created: 060704 |
Many small-scale societies lack formal institutions of government capable of forcing members to cooperate for the collective welfare. Cooperation is instead founded upon common values, systems of taboos, and so on, but especially upon social entanglements that put people in a position where they feel a need to cooperate to avoid betraying those who matter to them. This essay deals with the world of conflicting loyalties and the links between groups.
Sociologists distinguish "simplex" and "multiplex" relationships as two fundamentally different ways that people can be related to each other.
A simplex relationship is one that involves only one social status for each participant. Examples would be seller-buyer, sister-brother, donor-recipient, or teacher-student. In the idealized simplex relationship, the two parties have no interest in each other beyond that single relationship and its associated behaviors: If I am the seller and you are the buyer, our relationship ends when the sale is completed. If you are the teacher and I am the student, neither of us knows or particularly cares what happens to the other outside of the classroom. And so on.
A multiplex relationship occurs when there is more than one kind of link between the participants: teacher/mother-student/daughter or performer/patient-audience/physician.
Because individual social statuses have behavioral requirements, a multiplex relationship has the potential for conflicting loyalties. Here are some examples.
Problem 1. Mary has a jalopy that she wants to sell before the engine block drops out on a freeway somewhere, but she would like to get as much for it as she can by convincing an unwary buyer that it is a Dream Car.
The first customer arrives, attracted by her ad (which says "This is your Dream Car!"), and he thinks it is beautiful. However he is also her cousin, the one who gave her an expensive concert ticket to hear the Dead Metal Monkeys last Christmas. So does she sell it to him or not?
Solution. Her problem comes from the same person being both her customer and her cousin. She perhaps assumed she wouldn't care about the welfare of a customer, whom she would probably never see again. But she has to live with her cousin for the rest of her life, and can't really afford to have him eternally mad at her.
So she refuses to sell it to him, admitting that it is a pile of junk.
Problem 2. Sarah's parents have been Republicans since before she was born, and they think it is unimaginable that anybody but Satan and his minions could possibly be a Democrat. Sarah has always voted for Republicans and has helped her parents campaign for them.
Sarah's current boyfriend, however, is the son of a prominent Democrat from her district. He is now up for election, challenging a Republican incumbent. The boyfriend's father needs every vote he can possibly get.
How should Sarah vote? Should she try to persuade her parents to vote for the Democrat?
Comment. Multiplex relationships, with their high potential for conflicting loyalties, tend to moderate people's behavior and increase people's need to cooperate with each other. Mary let one relationship (cousin) prevail over the other. Sarah has a harder choice, but is likely to try to moderate her family's Republicanism so she can support her boyfriend's father or at least to reduce their opposition to her going out with a Democrat.
Multiplex relationships may cause people to be peacemakers in some contexts, but they also create mixed motives and make it hard to interpret the motives of others. For example, when an industrialist appoints his nephew as the manager of his Paris branch, people suspect it is not because the lad is a genius (even if he is), but because of his relation with the industrialist.
In most small-scale societies, all or nearly all relationships are multiplex. Significant simplex relationships are a feature of societies in which strangers are forced into interaction, a situation commoner in larger-scale societies.
A person who is a member of two different social groups is in a position to pass information between them, which can facilitate cooperation and benefit both groups. But such a person can sometimes be in an uncomfortable position if the two groups make conflicting demands, even if the member has a simplex relationship with the people in each of the two groups.
Problem 3. Charles plays baseball on Tuesday nights and has choir practice on Wednesday nights. He is the only person who is a member of both groups. But both groups have decided to meet on Thursday next week to avoid a holiday. Which one should he attend?
Solution. Charles works hard and manages to persuade the baseball team to meet on Friday instead.
Comment. Conflicting loyalties pose a challenge for the individual who hates to favor one side over the other. This produces a motivation to try to reduce the conflict by persuading the two sides to coordinate rather than compete. Charles is successful in this, presumably because nobody in either of the two groups has a firm interest in one day rather than the other so long as the holiday is avoided.
One of the most important kinds of groups in small scale societies is the lineage or class. We have an example among the Hopi, where each person is a member of the clan of his or her mother, and therefore each household includes people from more than one clan, and every clan includes people from many households. Clan memberships tie households to each other, and household memberships tie clans to each other.
It is tempting to see multiple group memberships as conducive to harmony in social relations, but it is not always so easy as that. For example, individuals may be torn between the conflicting demands of family and state.
Conflicting loyalties can sometimes be deliberately manipulated to force an individual to weaken one of the affiliations.
Problem 4. Alice and Celeste are from Taiwan. Each is a member both of the Chinese Students Association and of the Taiwan Students Association. When one of the organizations decides to have its New Year Dinner on February 15, the leaders of the other one deliberately pick the same date so that members won't be able to attend both dinners. "That will force all the members to show where their loyalties really lie," says the president, "in China or Taiwan!"
Celeste goes to the Chinese association dinner, but afterward she is criticized by friends in the Taiwan association for not being a "true Taiwanese," so she doesn't dare go to Taiwan association meetings again. Alice decides not to attend either dinner. Nobody criticizes her, but she doesn't go back to either group.
Comment. Social structure, like other things, can be manipulated by participants. The association president succeeds in forcing Celeste to take a public political position, which can then be used by the "winning" group as a minor political victory. But the manipulation was not well done; both groups lose Alice from their membership.
Some activities require the participation of "representatives" from different social groups (or social categories). These situations are of interest because the need to cooperate in such activities can sometimes force groups to cooperate in other areas as well, theoretically lessening the probability of groups drifting apart or, worse yet, engaging in destructive conflict.
Problem 5. Every residence hall is asked to contribute to the blood bank, with a prize for the hall that contributes the most blood.
The Residents of Toad Hall have just put out a lot of money in fines for the windows broken during the Oktoberfest party and are feeling quite alienated from the other halls. But it would be a big loss of face not to participate if all the other halls are doing so, and accordingly they join the effort to recruit blood donors, even if they don't seriously try for the prize.
In anthropology, cross-cutting ties appear in most of the societies we study, and in many cases are one of the primary devices for promoting social coherence and cooperation. Two societies that can serve as examples are the Hopi of Arizona and the Arapesh of Papua New Guinea.
Among the Hopi, we see the manipulation of cross-cutting ties institutionalized as a contrast between kinship affiliations (especially clans) and the ceremonial societies. Most Hopi ceremonies require people with quite a range of affiliations; to perform the ceremony requires that they be willing to cooperate with each other. Given the religious necessity of performing the ceremonies, there is a very strong motivation to be sure that conflicts never reach the point of people refusing to cooperate with each other.
The Arapesh formerly had one of the elaborate systems known for creating interdependency. The Arapesh conducted rites from time to time to a mysterious force called the Tambaran. The Tambaran rites were believed to be necessary to social welfare, especially in order to initiate groups of men into complex religious mysteries, but also in times when cooperation was breaking down and people were getting on each other’s nerves. But each Tambaran rite required the participation of people from a wide range of arbitrarily differentiated categories. Therefore everyone who needed to play a role in a Tamburan rite was motivated to be a mediator and peace-maker, and a Tambran ritual produced at least temporary harmony.
It would be an exaggeration to assert that humans deliberately create cross-cutting ties in order to maintain order, or that rituals involving different categories of people were devised with cross-cutting ties as a goal. But formally complex systems, often involving religious or initiation rituals, are commonly found in situations in which there may be little in the way of government able to force cooperation, and it is reasonable to see them as a critical part of the "political" life of small-scale societies.