The Evolution of Leadership: Transitions in Decision Making from Small-Scale to Middle-Range Societies

Leaders make decisions that have significant impacts on the lives of others. They have the ability to influence events and impact the evolutionary trajectories of societies. Leaders exist in all societies, ranging from smaller-scale heads of households to larger-scale elected governing bodies to dictators with vast coercive powers at their disposal. Today, all of us are familiar with and see (and feel) the influence of leaders. Given that leaders and leadership are so influential on human social behavior, and yet are variably represented among different societies in the past and present, generations of scholars have examined these social phenomena from a variety of humanistic and scientific perspectives. This book, the product of an advanced seminar at the School for Advanced Research (SAR), brings together the perspectives of cultural anthropologists and archaeologists to explore why and how leadership emerges and variously becomes institutionalized among disparate small-scale and middle-range human societies.