The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

One approach is the evolutionary one discussed and illustrated in the preceding section: to recognize broad features differing between societies of different population sizes and population densities, but shared among societies of similar population sizes and densities; and to infer, and sometimes to observe directly, changes in a society as it becomes larger or smaller. Related to that evolutionary approach is what may be termed an adaptationist approach: the idea that some features of a society are adaptive, and that they enable the society to function more effectively under its particular material conditions, physical and social environment, and size and density. Examples include the need for all societies consisting of more than a few thousand people to have leaders, and the potential of those large societies to generate the food surpluses required to support leaders. This approach encourages one to formulate generalizations, and to interpret changes of a society with time in terms of the conditions and environment under which the society lives.
A second approach, lying at the opposite pole from that first approach, views each society as unique because of its