Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists,
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Documents in EconStor maygreater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners. We also analyze how competition among societies, both egalitarian societies and those with differing degrees of stratification, influences the long-run evolution of the institutional forms that support social stratification. In our discussion, we illustrate the model using two ethnographic cases, explore the relationships between our model and other existing approaches to social stratification within anthropology, and compare our model to the emergence of heritable divisions of labor in other species. 1993, Durkheim 1933, Fried 1967, Gilman 1981, Lenski, Lenski, and Nolan 1991, Ruyle 1973, Service 1975. Here, we focus on understanding "stratification," as the emergence and persistence of institutionalized economic differences between social groups.Inequality is ubiquitous. Within every human society, individuals of different ages, genders or abilities receive different shares of the overall economic output. In some societies these differences are glorified and exaggerated, while in others they are more subtle and often go unacknowledged, yet they are always there (Fried 1967). Our puzzle, however, is not this ubiquitous inequality among individuals, but persistent inequality among social groups, like classes, castes, ethnic groups, and guilds. Because such groups include a wide sampling of people, it is not plausible that inequality results from innate differences in size, skill, or the like among the individuals who make them up (Richerson and Boyd 2005a). Instead, these differences must result from something that individuals acquire as a consequence of group membership. This leads to the obvious question: why don't people on the wrong side of such inequalities adopt the skills, practices, behaviors, or strategies of the people in the group or groups who are getting a disproportionately large share of the economic benefits produced by a society?Scholars have given at least three kinds of answers to this question (Durkheim 1933 1979). While each of these solutions to the puzzle has its partisans, the longevity of the debate suggests that none are completely satisfactory.Here we present a novel model for the emergence of social stratification, without coercion, deception or exogenous source...