[spcoll]

Hunter-gatherer societies that did fit this model could be considered to be the ultimate totalitarian organizations. Extremely strict rules controlling every aspect of the life of the members, from birth to death, and no deviation ever tolerated, under pain of banishment or even death.

[iamcurious]

Yes but the power equation wasn't as bad as a modern totalitarian society. In a 100 people tribe, you are exactly 1% of it, and know in person the entire population.

[jessaustin]

Over most of human hunter-gatherer prehistory, the population was not generally resource-constrained. (Rather, it was constrained over the long term by catastrophes, which could be related to resources, diseases, genetics, culture, or some combination.) Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation. One just walked for some time, until one was alone or in more accepting company, and then started hunting and gathering wherever one found oneself. This actually leads me to wonder whether "banishment" could even have been an actual threat, before the advent of agriculture. What if the tribe "banished" some people, and then a year later found itself migrating into wherever they had settled? Would it "banish" them again, if it could?

[dalke]

"Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation."

Do you have a reference for that? It doesn't jibe with my understanding of banishment, but my readings are from agricultural traditions. More specifically, outlawry under Germanic law, where someone was judge to be outside of the protection of the law. Full outlawry on Iceland effectively meant banishment from Iceland or death. (See https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/09-... .)

I found https://books.google.com/books?id=9ZkIAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA81&ots=... which says:

> By the end of the last ice age .... To be cast out of a band .. usually meant total banishment from the society and eventual death, either by starvation or as a result of aggression by members of another society (Salisbury, 1962).

And here's a reference concerning Aboriginal use of banishment, from http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter2.html :

> As in European societies, some crimes required the complete removal of the criminal from society. In most Aboriginal societies, this meant banishment. In such close, family-oriented societies, where survival depended upon communal cooperation, such sanctions were considered a humane alternative to death, no matter how traumatic they may have been to the offender.

Further, http://rsc2012hscls.wikispaces.com/file/view/Law+Reform+Coun... :

> Exile or banishment has been described as an extremely harsh punishment and was not embraced by all Aboriginal societies.

This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural era banishment was not a real threat.

Further, I do not follow the logic to "Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation".

Consider this non-real scenario. Humans can survive only be eating buffalo meat. There are huge numbers of buffalo compared to humans, so there is a food surplus. However, it takes 10 people to kill one buffalo. In that scenario, exiling someone leads to certain death as a lone human cannot hunt a buffalo. While the human species is not resource-constrained, a single human is.

Similarly, in Intuit cultures there were strong specializations between male and female roles. For example, it was women who were trained in how to sew the skins to make clothes against the harsh weather, while the men learned hunting skills. If a male were banished, I wonder if he might not have the skills to survive on his own.

[coldtea]

>This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural era banishment was not a real threat.

It doesn't have to be a real threat to be considered "extremely harsh".

That is, it's not just physical damage or potential danger that's "harsh". Isolation from the community you belong too could be considered just as harsh, from a social standpoint.

[dalke]

I do not understand your comment. I was asking for clarification as the statement did not match my understanding of banishment across several cultures, nor does the logic used to reach the conclusion make sense.

In this context I used "threat" as a short-hand for the previous poster's "Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation". I did not mean it as a purely physical threat. Indeed, the link I gave to Aboriginal customary law uses 'threat' for both physical and non-physical punishments ("In addition to the threat of being killed for a breach of customary law it has been reported that in some cases the threat also involved the denial of mortuary rites"), so my broader use does not appear to be unusual.

Therefore, I agree with your comment, as it is a restatement of mine. But my experience is that comments with similar structure to yours are meant to point out incorrect or incomplete statement. Yet I don't see how that's the case here.

Would you kindly elaborate the intent behind your response?

[bayesianhorse]

Banishment is most certainly a punishment. Just imagine never being allowed to speak with almost all the people you met in your entire life.

Hunter Gatherers also find a strength and safety in numbers, even if only in avoiding the fatility of personal "catastrophes" like a broken limb.

[bootload]

"Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation. One just walked for some time, until one was alone or in more accepting company, and then started hunting and gathering wherever one found oneself."

Where danger can be found, banishment is death. Consider this quote from Sebastian Junger:

"What all these people seem to miss isn’t danger or loss, per se, but the closeness and cooperation that danger and loss often engender. Humans evolved to survive in extremely harsh environments, and our capacity for cooperation and sharing clearly helped us do that. Structurally, a band of hunter-gatherers and a platoon in combat are almost exactly the same: in each case, the group numbers between 30 and 50 individuals, they sleep in a common area, they conduct patrols, they are completely reliant on one another for support, comfort, and defense, and they share a group identity that most would risk their lives for." [0]

There is a lot of anthropological studies that confirm this observation.

[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebasti...

[zby]

Care to link to sources on that?

From what I read on hunter-gatherers they were very egalitarian - and there was no need for strict rules controlling every aspect of the life of the members. Unlike in pastoral and settled cultures they did not have any way to accumulate wealth and they did not need to defend it later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_econ...

In fact the ways hunter-gatherers enforced their rules were often playful: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/ho... (lots of other interesting material at this site).