No society has ever handed out its work at random. Every one of them sorts jobs by age and by sex — those two are as close to universal as anything anthropologists have found. What each society then puts in each box turns out to vary so wildly between neighbours that it cannot be read off the body. And a third axis, specialisation, only opens up once there is enough surplus food to feed someone who does not grow any. Explore all three.
The lifespan
Three rules that hold everywhere
1Every society divides work by age and by sex. No society yet described divides it by neither. These are the two universal axes.
2What goes in each box is not universal. Outside a short list of tasks, the assignment differs so much between neighbouring peoples that biology cannot be the explanation.
3Specialisation beyond age and sex has a price: someone can only do one thing all day if other people's food feeds them. Full-time specialists appear with the surplus and the centre that collects it.
Age and sex everywhere · specialisation only where there is surplus. Emile Durkheim built his whole first book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), on the second half of that sentence: as work divides, what holds a society together stops being likeness and starts being need for one another.
Three ways to divide the worktap a mode to begin
The curve on the left is a schematic of the production and consumption profiles Hillard Kaplan measured in Aché, Hiwi and Machiguenga households. Its shape is the point: a human being takes far more than they make for about twenty years, and then repays it for forty or more. That long, expensive childhood is what buys the skill the adult work needs.
George Murdock and Caterina Provost (1973) coded fifty technological tasks across a sample of 185 societies and ranked each by how consistently it fell to men or to women. A handful sit hard at one end. Most sit in the middle — and the middle is where the anthropology is. Tap a task, or tap a dot on the ladder.
BandTribeChiefdomStateIndustrial
Elman Service's four types are a sorting device, not a ladder every society climbs. Real societies straddle them, move both ways, and some very large and complex ones have no chiefs at all. Use them to notice what specialisation costs and what it buys — not to rank anybody. Tap any of the twenty figures to see what that person does.