Book summary “Sick societies”: summary

Introduction

You often inherit a romantic view of traditional societies as peaceful stewards living in idyllic harmony with nature. When you study anthropology, you frequently encounter the dogma that all cultural customs are functional and adaptive for their members. This perspective leaves you unable to criticize harmful practices or recognize systemic suffering outside modern civilization.

Robert B. Edgerton challenges this dogma in Sick Societies by demonstrating that many traditional and small-scale societies maintain severely maladaptive customs. You will discover how cultural traits can produce widespread misery, violence, and institutional failure rather than survival. The book exposes the limits of strict cultural relativism and examines why humans persist in self-destructive behaviors.

• Which cultural practices actively reduce human health and longevity?
• Why do societies fail to eliminate lethal customs despite knowing their costs?
• How do political elites exploit populations within small-scale and complex societies?

1. The Myth of Primitive Harmony

You often encounter the widespread belief that small-scale or primitive societies live in idyllic harmony and peace. Scholars, popular culture, and philosophers have long contrasted the misery and conflict of modern urban life with this idealized view of small folk societies. However, reliable evidence reveals that human misery, cruelty, and maladaptive behaviors are also deeply entrenched in traditional societies.

Small-scale and traditional societies are frequently plagued by misery, cruelty, and maladaptive behaviors, contradicting the romantic myth of the Noble Savage.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau based his portrait of the Noble Savage on an orangutan. Popular films like Dances with Wolves reinforce the romantic view of primitive life.

Ethnographic Idealization

Anthropologists have frequently idealized small-scale societies in their monographs. They often underreport human suffering, violence, and cruelty due to personal idealism or a desire to protect the people they study from disrepute.

Jane Belo described the Balinese as completely gentle and orderly. Yet her own text documented wife beating and rebellions. Robert Redfield's idyllic view of Tepoztlan was later challenged by Oscar Lewis as rife with mistrust and hatred. Colin Turnbull wrote The Forest People about the harmonious Mbuti and later published The Mountain People about the brutalized Ik. Bernd Heine challenged this picture years later regarding the approximately 2,000 people of the Ik in northern Uganda during Turnbull's study.

Empirical Evidence of Suffering

Some small-scale populations live in chronic hunger and fear with virtually no mutual concern. This proves that folk life can be profoundly miserable without external disruption.

Allan R. Holmberg lived with the Sirionó of eastern Bolivia in 1941 and 1942. They suffered from constant food shortages, harsh environmental conditions, and extreme individualism where family members showed no concern for one another and abandoned the sick or elderly. When a Sirionó hunter was lost in the dark and called for help, nearby relatives ignored him. His sister later complained only because he brought back too little food.

Cultural beliefs can trap a population in persistent poverty and powerlessness by strictly limiting cooperation outside the nuclear family. The impoverished farmers of Montegrano in southern Italy lived with chronic fatigue, hunger, and melancholia known as la misèria. They remained entirely incapable of organized community action due to their family-centered culture. Edward C. Banfield observed that despite wanting better education and healthcare for their children, the people of Montegrano took no collective action to improve their inadequate local school, bus schedule, or distant ambulance service located five hours by auto away.

2. From Relativism to Evaluation

While cultural relativism successfully combats ethnocentrism and racism, it creates a barrier to evaluating whether certain sociocultural systems are more harmful or less adaptive than others.

You see domestic drug abuse or gang violence as harmful. Yet cultural relativism argues against scientifically evaluating foreign practices such as judicial torture or human sacrifice. Relativists argue that cultures must be understood in their own context. They assume that all established practices are adaptive. This adaptivism prevents scholars from recognizing severe institutional dysfunctions.

Critique of Relativism

Epistemological relativism treats all cultural practices as incommensurable. You cannot judge one system against another without committing ethnocentrism. However, this stance makes it impossible to condemn genocide, infanticide, or slavery.

From 1848 to 1879, some 200 communitarians lived in a large New York house under John H. Noyes before the Oneida Community collapsed and Noyes fled to Canada. Noyes enforced group marriage, banned emotional attachments, and required coitus reservatus. The community survived for about 30 years using strict conformity rules and group criticism sessions. It ultimately collapsed when Noyes tried to monopolize all young women for himself and older leaders, provoking a rebellion among young men and threats of statutory rape prosecution.

Populations can survive for decades in conditions of severe physical illness, extreme poverty, and institutional vacuum while maintaining high psychological commitment to their way of life. Rena Gazaway documented 238 individuals living in Duddie's Branch, an isolated Kentucky hollow where children were so malnourished at age six they achieved half normal growth, and homes were infested with lice, rats, and cockroaches. Despite these horrific physical conditions, the inhabitants were fiercely loyal to their hollow and expressed contentment with their lives.

Criteria for Maladaptation

Cultural maladaptation can be rigorously defined and measured using three objective, self-evident criteria rather than abandoning evaluation to extreme relativism.

You can identify institutional failure without resorting to subjective bias. Edgerton establishes specific functional prerequisites for human survival.

• Define maladaptation as the failure of a population or its culture to survive due to the inadequacy or harmfulness of beliefs or institutions.
• Identify maladaptation when enough members are sufficiently dissatisfied with social institutions that societal viability is threatened.
• Classify practices as maladaptive when they seriously impair physical or mental health, preventing members from meeting their needs.

3. Maladaptation and Human Nature

You might assume that long-standing cultural beliefs and practices are inherently adaptive. Most scholars share this view, assuming that cultural evolution mirrors biological natural selection.

Cultural traits can become maladaptive through environmental change, conservative resistance to innovation, and innate biological predispositions.

When ethnographers acknowledge harmful practices, they often adopt a Panglossian view. They claim that presumed positive benefits outweigh tragic costs. Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton concluded that Navaho witchcraft beliefs caused tragic suffering and violence, but argued that these beliefs kept the core of society solid by redirecting hostility.

Causes of Maladaptation

Human practices can be maladaptive from the beginning or become so when environments change. Small traditional populations are often conservative and uninnovative, retaining practices that reflect genetic predispositions rather than optimal solutions.

Isolated for 10,000 to 12,000 years, the 4,000 Tasmanians possessed no more than two dozen items in their entire manufactured goods inventory and abandoned bone tools, boomerangs, and fishing entirely.

Maladaptation emerges through several distinct routes:

• inefficient solutions to environmental demands;
• shifts in surrounding ecological conditions;
• lack of innovation within isolated populations;
• powerful elites favoring institutions that serve their own interests.

Biological Mismatch

Traits selected for during the Pleistocene persist today and conflict with the demands of stable social living. Human biological predispositions may become pathological or maladaptive in modern environments.

Modern cravings for fat, salt, and sugar became harmful once these substances became readily available. Male competition for mates and innate stress responses can similarly clash with contemporary social requirements.

4. Inequality and Exploitation

Social inequality and political exploitation are universal phenomena present in small-scale chiefdoms as well as large empires.

Anthropologists often idealize small societies as egalitarian. Universal distinctions based on sex, age, and ability exist everywhere. When resources become abundant, even foraging groups develop classes and hereditary authority.

The Chumash Indians on the California coast practiced no agriculture yet accumulated clamshell money. They maintained an upper class based on this wealth, lower classes, and slaves.

Stratification in Small Societies

In small chiefdoms, leaders frequently advance their own interests at the expense of lower-status people. Chiefs exploit their power to secure a disproportionate share of food, labor, and reproductive advantages.

On Ifaluk Atoll with fewer than 500 people, clan chiefs took home almost twice as much fish after a communal catch. They spent half as much time in physical labor and had more children than other men.

Male dominance is a universal reality that leads to direct exploitation and physical deprivation of women. Men use their physical strength and cultural rules to control women and reserve high-protein foods exclusively for men.

Among the Chukchee of Siberia, women did all the work of slaughtering and cooking reindeer. Men ate their fill and left only scraps, telling the women being women, eat crumbs.

Extreme cultural hostility between men and women can become institutionalized. This generates deep fear and anger without serving any positive social function.

Among the Gusii of western Kenya, wedding rituals involved public insults and physical resistance by the bride. Men committed rape almost four times as often as the average rate in the United States.

State Oppression

Large civilized states have historically tended to increase the well-being of a powerful few at the direct expense of the majority. State formation allows ruling elites to monopolize wealth and resources.

In 1840 in Manchester, England, the average age at death for gentlemen was 38, for traders 20, and for unskilled laborers 17.

Despotic rulers can build vast military empires through ruthless intimidation and state terror. Such terror ultimately invites rebellion.

Shaka built a Zulu force of over 100,000 that defeated over thirty tribes. He relied on daily public executions until his terror became so intolerable that he was assassinated by his half-brothers in 1828. His military force reached over 100,000 men, ruling over half a million people, and he ordered 7,000 deaths after his mother died.

Powerful militaristic empires could accumulate immense wealth through gold and tribute. Conquest states maintained elaborate bureaucracies funded by taxing conquered peoples and using slaves for intensive labor.

The Asante Empire in West Africa was enormously wealthy from gold production. A royal treasury held over 1,500,000 pounds sterling in the mid-1900s, while commoners lived modestly on small farms. Kumase had 30,000 permanent residents, and Asante mines produced 14,000,000 ounces of gold by 1900.

5. Sickness, Suffering, and Premature Death

Traditional medical practices, agricultural transitions, and intense social stressors often degrade physical and mental health.

You might assume that folk healers rely exclusively on safe, time-tested therapies. In reality, many traditional medical practices in small-scale societies are not only useless but actively dangerous to patients. These iatrogenic practices cause more harm than good through unhygienic methods and inept surgery.

The Yoruba of Nigeria treated childhood convulsions with a toxic tonic of green tobacco leaves marinated in urine and gin, resulting in deep unconsciousness. Mae Enga specialists in Papua New Guinea treated arrow wounds by making an armpit incision, breaking a rib with a wedge, collapsing a lung, and washing out the thorax with water.

Health Hazards of Agriculture

You discover that the historical transition from a foraging subsistence model to sedentary agriculture led to a marked decline in human health and life expectancy. Agricultural populations and early cities suffered from higher rates of malnutrition, iron-deficiency anemia, childhood infections, tooth decay, and infant mortality compared to mobile hunter-gatherers.

At the prehistoric sites in Kentucky, skeletal remains showed that permanent agriculturalists at Hardin Village were significantly less healthy than seminomadic hunter-gatherers at Indian Knoll. At the Aztec city of Teotihuacan around A.D. 500, life expectancy at birth ranged between 14 and 17 years. The infant mortality rate reached 40 percent, and only 38 percent of people born lived to be as old as 15.

You also encounter maladaptive beliefs regarding food and nutrition. In 1961 among the Kamba of Kenya, despite widespread childhood kwashiorkor following a drought, malnourished children were still forbidden to eat eggs, which were instead given to adults or sold. Among the Walbiri of Australia, an old woman named Maisie accidentally saw sacred items reserved for men and subsequently wasted away to skin and bone and became psychotic due to the automatic death taboo.

6. Discontent, Rebellion, and Reform

Profound cultural disaffection drives extreme alienation, substance abuse, and suicide, forcing populations to migrate or rebel.

Alienation and Self-Destruction

When you examine traditional ways of life, you find that profound cultural disaffection leads to extreme alienation and heavy substance abuse. High suicide and alcoholism rates signal systemic failure in meeting emotional and social needs.

Among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea, 57 percent of all deaths during a twenty-four-month period were suicides in the 1970s. Young men were overwhelmed by cultural standards of masculinity and repugnance toward ritual cannibalism.

Forms of Protest and Revitalization

Lacking direct political power, women frequently use indirect or collective methods of protest to express outrage against harsh cultural constraints. Pokot women in Kenya who suffered from excessive abuse organized to tie up their sleeping husband. They humiliated him, urinated and defecated on him, and beat his testicles with sticks until he capitulated and slaughtered his favorite ox for them.

Discontented populations respond to the degradation of their way of life by migrating or attempting cultural revitalization movements. Between 1620 and 1670, the population in T'an-ch'eng county dropped from 200,000 to 60,000 due to disasters and strife. When magistrate Huang Liu-hung arrived in 1670, he found widespread suicide and cannibalism.

Societies whose members experience chronic discontent cannot be considered well-adapted. Marquis de Custine recorded an 1839 account of Russian travelers who felt liberated when leaving Russia and gloomy upon returning, illustrating deep-seated societal dissatisfaction.

7. The Death of Societies

Destructive belief systems, cascading feuds, and complex civilizational costs can lead to population collapse and cultural suicide.

Feuding and Violence

Uncontrollable cycles of blood feuds and retaliation can trap small nomadic societies in a process of severe depopulation and cultural suicide. You see this in the Kaingáng Indians of Brazil who experienced a 75 percent population reduction due to incessant feuds, as described by anthropologist Jules Henry.

Supernatural beliefs can create a similarly maladaptive climate of fear. Among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea, nearly one-third of all deaths were homicides, with almost all victims being suspected witches out of a total population of 450 people.

Self-Destructive Prophecies

Desperate populations facing disease, war, and economic ruin can succumb to millenarian prophecies that instruct them to destroy their own primary economic resources. Prompted by prophets warning against witchcraft and promising a millennial rebirth, the Xhosa people slaughtered their cattle and abandoned crop cultivation, leading to mass starvation and the collapse of their political independence.

Encouraged by a young prophet named Mlajeni and later a teenager named Nongqawuse, King Sarhili and his people slaughtered hundreds of thousands of cattle, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation. In King Sarhili's domain, the population dropped from 105,000 Xhosa in 1855 to 25,916 Xhosa remaining by 1858, with 40,000 to 50,000 estimated deaths, 400,000 cattle slaughtered, and 600,000 acres of land appropriated by British officials.

Complex civilizations can collapse when the costs of maintaining large armies, bureaucracies, and services reach a point of declining marginal returns, leading to popular discontent. In the Western Roman Empire, high taxes required by an expensive bureaucracy led weary citizens to welcome Germanic invaders as a lesser evil.

Well-intentioned government relocations and modernizations can destroy traditional social structures and provoke extreme self-destructiveness. The Ojibwa Indians of Grassy Narrows in northern Ontario experienced extreme demoralization, severe alcohol abuse, high suicide rates among youths, and infant deaths following their government relocation in 1963 involving 500 Ojibwa, where 20 percent of those aged 11-16 attempted suicide in 1977-1978 and 22 percent infant deaths occurred compared to 4 percent in a nearby white town.

Conclusion

You can now see that human societies are not naturally harmonious or self-correcting mechanisms. Extreme cultural relativism blinds you to real suffering by treating every maladaptive practice as an equally valid adaptation. You must abandon the myth of the noble savage and evaluate human institutions based on how well they serve physical and psychological health.

1. Reject absolute cultural relativism that prevents you from recognizing harmful institutional failures and systemic violence.
2. Evaluate every cultural practice by its measurable consequences on human survival, physical health, and psychological well-being.
3. Recognize that traditional customs can become dangerously maladaptive when environmental conditions change or technologies fail.
4. Protect vulnerable populations from internal exploitation, severe inequality, and institutionalized cruelty.
5. Foster open critique, flexibility, and adaptive reform to prevent your society from stagnating into self-destruction.

10 Key Ideas

1. Small-scale and traditional societies are frequently plagued by misery, cruelty, and maladaptive behaviors, contradicting the romantic myth of the Noble Savage.
2. While cultural relativism successfully combats ethnocentrism and racism, it creates a barrier to evaluating whether certain sociocultural systems are more harmful or less adaptive than others.
3. Cultural maladaptation can be rigorously defined and measured using three objective, self-evident criteria rather than abandoning evaluation to extreme relativism.
4. Cultural traits can become maladaptive through environmental change, conservative resistance to innovation, and innate biological predispositions.
5. Social inequality and political exploitation are universal phenomena present in small-scale chiefdoms as well as large empires.
6. Traditional medical practices, agricultural transitions, and intense social stressors often degrade physical and mental health.
7. Profound cultural disaffection drives extreme alienation, substance abuse, and suicide, forcing populations to migrate or rebel.
8. Destructive belief systems, cascading feuds, and complex civilizational costs can lead to population collapse and cultural suicide.
9. Humans often persist in self-destructive behaviors due to conservative resistance, institutionalized elites, and evolutionary biological mismatches with modern environments.
10. Abandoning extreme cultural relativism enables the critical evaluation of human institutions based on their measurable consequences for survival and well-being.