Liberal Limits: Beyond Forensic Reckoning in Peru

collective action emerges in large-scale societies. The second part of How Humans Cooperate consists of six chapters, some coauthored with Fargher, that rely on an analysis of a cross-cultural sample of 30 societies for which adequate data exist for identifying the contexts of collective action.While some societies in the sample are well known from archaeological research, all have a documentary record from which to identify details that Blanton and Fargher need for their analyses. Drawing from this cross-cultural sample, the chapters consider how robust evidence for collective action articulates with other sociocultural components, such as commercial transactions, especially in market settings; fiscal strategies that support public works; territorial integrity and coordination; urban development; and aesthetic representations and religious formations. These chapters are rich in illustrative detail, so much so that I sometimes struggled to see the forest for the trees, and I would have appreciated at least some of the comparative methods and statistical analyses that Blanton and Fargher relegate to appendixes more prominently highlighted in these core chapters. In the final two chapters, and especially chapter 12, Blanton pulls together all the components that he and Fargher have identified as important for any anthropologically informed model of collective action and proposes a “coactive causal process” through which these interact within a framework of material conditions to spur the changes, leading to increasingly larger scales of collective action. Acknowledging the challenge of identifying causality in complex sociocultural processes, Blanton suggests that flexible (“elastic”) systems of production, the presence of inequities in wealth, the “biosocial challenges” of increasing urbanism, and the need for economic exchange, especially throughmarketplaces, together promote the need for increasingly elaborate forms of collective action to prevent society from dissolving. While these variables are seen as shaped by the physical environment and demographic change, Blanton argues against a simple determinism, instead emphasizing the complex dynamic relationships between context and sociocultural factors that, together, are seen as ultimately generating state-level institutions of collective action. How Humans Cooperate is an impressive effort, and there is much to admire and learn from the efforts of Blanton and Fargher to pull together so much information that contributes to an understanding of how complex sociocultural, and especially governmental, institutions form. Many of their conclusions as to which components are most impactful on collective action rely on discussions and analyses that are detailed in the bibliographic essays and analytical appendixes at the end of the book, as well as data coding available only in a separate volume published by the authors in 2008 (Blanton and Fargher 2008). The narrative of How Humans Cooperate therefore did not always convince me, and although I am an expert in none of the ancient and historic societies in their comparative analysis, I found myself skeptical of some of the anecdotes pulled from the cross-cultural sample. For example, fourth-century BCE Athens is repeatedly stood up as a paragon of cooperative dynamics, and yet most of the data used by Blanton is characteristic of only the 10% to 20% of Athenian society classified as the (free and male-only) “citizenry.” This observation leads me to one final comment. As anticipated by the book’s title, How Humans Cooperate, Blanton seems to equate cooperation with collective action, even as so many of his and Fargher’s cross-cultural examples underscore the coercive elements necessary to deploy collective action at scale. I suspect that Blanton is using literary license to make his points, or hemay be driven to this rhetorical strategy by a desire to align evolutionary psychology (arguably inaccurately) both with assumptions of an evolved, generalized human altruism and with mathematical modeling characteristic of game theory and evolutionary biology. In fact, cooperation operates outside of collective action, just as both competition and coercion— voluntary and involuntary—are essential to collective action; these points, tome at least, are obscured by the book’s dismissal of evolutionary cooperation theory as useful for understanding human behavior in complex sociocultural settings. Despite these concerns, there is much that How Humans Cooperate contributes to the discussion on the evolution of cooperation and the formation of complex human societies. Blanton, along with Fargher, is able to weave together a multitude of diverse and often opposing theoretical perspectives and a rich anthropological literature to present a comprehensive and empirically testable model of how complex sociocultural institutions emerge.