Page 158 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

135 Historical Materialism

other hand, the females, who gathered fruit and lived together
with their young, for whom they cared. In comparison to primate
societies, the strategic forms of cooperation and the rules of dis-
tribution were new; both innovations were directly connected
with the establishment of the first mode of production, the co-
operative hunt.
Thus the Marxian concept of social labor is suitable for de-
limiting the mode of life of the hominids from that of the
primates; but it does not capture the specifically human repro-
duction of life. Not hominids, but humans were the first to break
up the social structure that arose with the vertebrates—the one-
dimensional rank ordering in which every animal was transitively
assigned one and only one status. Among chimpanzees and ba-
boons this status system controlled the rather aggressive relations
between adult males, sexual relations between male and female,
and social relations between the old and the young. A familylike
relationship existed only between the mother and her young, and
between siblings. Incest between mothers and growing sons was
not permitted;!? there was no corresponding incest barrier be-
tween fathers and daughters, because the father role did not exist.
Even hominid societies converted to the basis of social labor did
not yet know a family structure. We can, of course, imagine how
the family might have emerged. The mode of production of the
socially organized hunt created a system problem that was re-
solved by the familialization of the male (Count),'* that is, by
the introduction of a kinship system based on exogamy. The
male society of the hunting band became independent of the
plant-gathering females and the young, both of whom remained
behind during hunting expeditions. With this differentiation,
linked to the division of labor, there arose a new need for inte-
gration, namely, the need for a controlled exchange between the
two subsystems. But the hominids apparently had at their disposal
only the pattern of status-dependent sexual relations. This pat-
tern was not equal to the new need for integration, the less so, the
more the status order of the primates was further undermined by
forces pushing in the direction of egalitarian relations within the
hunting band. Only a family system based on marriage and regu-
lated descent permitted the adult male member to link—via the