CH2. Microfoundations 34

MEANING AND MEMBERSHIP: ON THE ORIGIN OF THE EXISTENTIAL FUNCTION OF THE SOCIAL 35
THE COLLECTIVE AS EXISTENTIAL REFUGE 40
SOCIAL SKILL 45
SOCIAL SKILL IN ACTION 50
CONCLUSION 53



Rational choice theory has achieved widespread influence in a number of social science disciplines, most notably economics and political science. The perspective; however, has failed to gain much more than a toehold in sociology. Indeed, most sociologists are downright hostile to the theory. When pressed to explain why those in the discipline are very likely to complain that the per­spective is "asociological”—that the theory posits an atomized conception of the individual that does not accord with the "sociological perspective” But when it comes to the individual, what exactly is the "sociological perspective?” Beyond the rather facile assertion that humans are profoundly "social crea­tures,” sociologists have done little to fashion a distinctive account of what that actually means. After all, lots of species are intensely social, perhaps none more so than ants (Gordon 1999). Surely we are not social in the same sense that ants are. Our closest evolutionary relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—are also very social species, and social in many ways that mirror human sociability. But there are also myriad ways in which human social life is qualitatively dif­ferent from that of even these closest evolutionary cousins. Bottom line: to dis­miss rational choice theory for its failure to honor the extent to which we are "social creatures” is to evade the real question: what is the distinctive essence of human sociability?
We will not pretend to offer anything like a complete answer to that question here, but believing that any serious theory of human collective behavior must rest on a credible microfoundation, we use the first half of this chapter to sketch a bare-bones perspective on what we see as the distinctive essence of human sociability. We review the current literature on the emergence of modern humans to argue that language, culture, and the problem of meaning are at the center of what it means to be human. Then, we link this to sociological conceptions of sociability, making brief forays into the classical theories of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead. In the second half of the chapter, we explicate how what we term the "existential function of the social” enables the "social skills” that undergird the forms of strategic action that are central to the theory on offer here.

Meaning and Membership: On the Origin of the Existential Function of the Social

We begin by considering accepted knowledge about social organization and the evolution of primates. Modern humans belong to the general biological order of primates that may have emerged as long as 85 million years ago and includes a dizzying variety of extinct and contemporary species. This variety is nicely reflected in the smallest and largest of contemporary primates. The smallest is the Madame Berthe s mouse lemur, which weighs little more than an ounce; the largest the mountain gorilla, which can tip the scale at up to 450 pounds. So not discounting some common physical characteristics, it is clear that the order is not primarily defined by its shared anatomy. "Unspecified anatomically, pri­mates are distinguished by social organization and evolutionary trends within the order tending toward increased dexterity and intelligence” (The Concise Colum­bia Encyclopedia 1983: 689; emphasis added).
Not surprisingly, hominids are the most social of all of the primate species. Split off from common primate ancestors about 15-20 million years ago, the hominid family is composed of four extant genera—chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans. All of the species that today comprise these different groupings are highly social. Based on the archaeological record, however, it seems clear that for virtually the entirety of their presence on earth, the func­tions of hominid sociability were essentially materialist in nature. That is, hom­inids lived together for the material or survival advantages that group life conferred. This claim would seem to apply as much to our immediate human ancestors—the genus Homo, signaled by the appearance of Homo habilis roughly 2.4 million years ago—as to the other hominid genera. Indeed, and here is where it gets really interesting, for most of our own scant time on earth, the so­ciability of anatomically modern humans—that is Homo sapiens—appears to have been qualitatively materialist as well. That is, for roughly 150,000 years after the appearance of the species, Homo sapiens did not exhibit the capacity for collaborative, symbolic activity that we associate with modern humans. The emergence of culture in this more restrictive, existential sense only appears to have occurred somewhere around 45,000-50,000 years ago. It is to this puzzle that we now turn.
The consensus is that modern humans emerged in Africa around 200,000 years ago. These new arrivals would seem to be anatomically indistinct from us. Most important, their brain size was indistinguishable from ours. Yet, this clear anatomical break with the past does not appear to have been accompanied by a comparable change in behavior. In point of fact, we will need to fast forward roughly 150,000 years before we encounter clear evidence of the emergence of
modem human behavior. The evidence is overwhelming, appearing as a veri­table explosion in the archaeological record of elaborate ritual burial and routine production of art and ornamentation, among other indicators that we are clearly in the presence of our existential, as opposed to materialist, kin.
What is the nature of this explosion and what are its implications for an under­standing of the social? One common rendering of this evolutionary “moment” is that it marks the emergence of “culture,” in the human experience. But even if we adopt a fairly narrow definition of culture, this account is demonstrably false. Tools are typically regarded as a rudimentary element of culture and certainly all of the prior species in the Homo line have been shown to produce and use tools. Indeed, depending on how broadly one defines the term, there is evidence for tool usage among our closest contemporary nonhuman relatives. For example, West African chimpanzees have been shown to use stone hammers and anvils to crack nuts (Boesch and Boesch 1993). Other species of chimpanzees have deployed other tools—including termite fishing probes, pestles, and various levers—in foraging for food (McGrew 1994). But even if we want to set the bar a bit higher in our requirements for culture, it would be impossible to deny, say, Neanderthal that level of evolutionary development. Beyond an effective and highly adaptable—if static— tool assemblage, there are at least scattered claims made for rudimentary Neander­thal burial and perhaps even representational art. These include an incised piece of bone from a 350,000-year-old site at Bilzingsleben in Germany and an alleged outline of a female engraved on a pebble from the 230,000-year-old pre-Mousterian site of Berekat Ram in Israel (Tattersall 1998).
If the “explosion” of 45,000-50,000 years ago does not represent the onset of culture in the human—or even hominid—experience, how are we to understand the breathtaking leap that seems to have taken place? While others have stressed the emergence of symbolic thinking or high culture, we, as sociologists, are inclined to underscore the collective aspect of the breakthrough. The sudden proliferation of art, elaborate grave goods, and distinctive local tool assemblages speaks to an unprece­dented capacity for coordinated symbolic activity and collaborative meaning making. We refer to this in shorthand as the onset of the existential function of the social. While hominids had heretofore banded together almost entirely for the survival benefits afforded by group life, the collective now served another separable function: the provision of group members with distinctive collective identities and shared un­derstandings of the world.[1] This represents a qualitative break with the entire 15 million-year sweep of the hominid experience on earth. We are finally in the pres­ence of a form of sociability that we would recognize as broadly akin to our own.
We cannot overstress the significance of the coordinated collaborative and in- tersubjective nature of the activities reflected in the archaeological record from this period and beyond. A single example will suffice to make the point. It comes from an extraordinary burial at the 28,000-year-old site of Sungir in Russia. Ian Tattersall describes what the excavation of the site revealed:

... two young individuals and a sixty-year-old male (no previous kind of human had ever survived to such an age) were interred with an aston­ishing material richness. Each of the deceased was dressed in clothing onto which more than three thousand ivory beads had been sewn; and experiments have shown that each bead had taken an hour to make. They also wore carved pendants, bracelets, and shell necklaces. The juveniles, buried head to head, were flanked by two mammoth tusks over two yards long. What’s more, these tusks had been straightened, something that... could only have been achieved by boiling them. But how? The imagination boggles, for this was clearly not a matter of drop­ping hot stones into a small skin-lined pit. (1998:10)

Tattersall goes on to intuit what the burial tells us about the people who car­ried it out, arguing for such things as a belief in an afterlife, the presence of ma­terial surplus, and the like. But, to us as sociologists, what the author does not mention is at least as significant as what he does. Above all else the site, to us, speaks of an extraordinary capacity for coordinated, meaningful, symbolic, collab­orative activity. We use the term “meaningful” to underscore the fact that the ritual act encoded in the interment was clearly full of shared meaning for those involved. How many people did it take to boil and straighten the mammoth tusks? Who contributed the 3,000 hours required to make and then sew the ivory beads on to the burial clothes? What did the various grave goods and the rituals involved in their production mean to the mourners? We will never know, but one can be assured that the members of the group shared an acute and elab­orate sense of the event’s significance. In sharp contrast to the earlier Homo sapi­ens, whose archaeological traces remain strangely mute, we are finally in the presence of voracious symbolists, people like us who possess both a clear ca­pacity and an apparent need to fashion shared identities and meanings as a cen­tral component of social life.
Before we move on and discuss the implications — negative as well as positive — of the newfound existential function of the social, we cannot resist taking up the puzzling gap between the development of anatomically modern humans roughly 200,000 years ago and the onset of the social behavioral revolu­tion of 45,000-50,000 years ago. How are we to account for this delay? We see three possible answers to the question. The first possibility is that the earliest “moderns” were, in fact, engaged in symbolic, collaborative activity, but we have not yet found the corroborating physical evidence to support the claim. Given the European bias in the record, this view is at least possible. We would do well to remember that modem humans only made it to Europe around 40,000 years ago. That means that the new species was confined to Africa and the Middle East for the first 125,000-150,000 or so years of its existence. Perhaps we simply have not searched long and hard enough in those locales to produce the requisite ev­idence of ritual burial and decorative art.
While possible, we think the first answer strains credulity. After all, while Europe has seen intensive archaeological investigation, so too has Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, Europe’s fascination with Egypt and the Holy Lands made Northern Africa and the Middle East a central focus of archaeological activity from early on. Since Leakey’s extraordinary finds in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley in the early 1950s, East Africa has been the center of archaeological research regarding the origins of man. Given the research attention lavished on these areas, it seems highly unlikely that we have simply missed the evidence of the “explosion,” especially given how extensive the evidence has been at the later sites. In short, we suspect that the paucity of evidence of symbolic, collab­orative activity in these areas is real, reflecting its general absence in the lives of the earlier Homo sapiens.
How do we explain this? We see language, or the lack thereof, as the key to the gap. The second answer goes like this. While anatomically adapted to speech, perhaps early humans lacked the precise neural circuitry needed for fully elabo­rated language. So deprived, earlier Homo sapiens may still have possessed a mar­ginally greater capacity for interspecies communication than Neanderthals, but nothing compared to what they would develop in time. While not identical, our view bears a strong family resemblance to the account of anthropologist Richard Klein (2002), who has long held that the symbolic revolution of 45,000 years ago must have been triggered by a random genetic mutation that improved the organization of the brain, affording humans the capacity for language and enhanced symbolic activity.
The third answer is really a variant of the second. While fully adapted to speech and language, it may be that the actual behavioral innovation lagged behind the anatomical emergence of Homo sapiens. This may not be quite as crazy as it sounds. Think of written language. Clearly humans had both the phys­iological and mental capacity for written language long before those capacities were translated into behavior. We do not think it is so farfetched to imagine that something similar could have happened with speech.
Whichever version of the latter two answers one favors, both accord well with the physical evidence and help explain some otherwise puzzling features of the archaeological record. The absence of significant ritual activity prior to
50.0          years ago becomes less puzzling if we assume that a fully realized ca­pacity for human speech did not accompany the rise of Homo sapiens but only developed later. This might also explain a second intriguing anomaly in the ar­chaeological record. While Neanderthals disappear from Western Europe barely
12.0        years after modern humans arrive on the scene, the two species appear to have coexisted in the Middle East for nearly 60,000 years, from 100,000 to
40.0        years ago. How can we account for these very different fates? Quite easily if we imagine that only the European Homo sapiens possessed a fully realized capacity for human speech and language. Without such a capacity, perhaps their Middle Eastern predecessors lacked the key evolutionary advantage needed to displace their Neanderthal rivals.
Whatever the case, the extraordinary evolutionary advantages conferred on modem humans by the acquisition of language and the related capacity for col­laborative, symbolic activity are affirmed by the archaeological record before and after the creative explosion of 50,000 years ago. Consider the following stark contrast. Over roughly the first 150,000 years of the Homo sapien presence on this planet, the species was pretty much confined to Africa and the Middle East. The physical traces of their presence suggest an undifferentiated, fairly continuous way of life. Nor do their numbers appear to increase much during their long tenure in Africa. And as noted above, where they overlap with earlier human ancestors—for example, Neanderthal—they coexist with, rather than displace, them.
After the “great leap” of 50,000 years ago, the story could not be more dif­ferent. Within at most 35,000 years—and possibly less—modern humans suc­ceeded in peopling the globe. Within a scant 12,000 years of arriving in Europe, they—make that “we”—displaced the venerable Neanderthal who had lived
continuously in the region for at least 350,000 years. Our numbers expanded in fits and starts before mushrooming explosively over the past three to four cen­turies. Finally, the "undifferentiated, fairly continuous” way of life of our earlier Homo sapien ancestors quickly give way to the dizzying variety of cultures and lifeworlds reflected in the archaeological record of the last fifty millennia. Over this span, "humanity,” to quote Klein, "was transformed from a relatively rare and insignificant large mammal to something like a geologic force” (quoted in Leslie 2002: 58). None of this is really all that surprising when you consider the extraordinary evolutionary advantages conveyed by the acquisition of language and the expanded capacity for communication and social coordination that fol­lowed from that endowment.

The Collective as Existential Refuge

One of the most interesting aspects of these discoveries is the way that they dovetail with thinking in sociology, from Weber and Durkheim to Mead, Goff- man, Berger and Luckmann, and Bourdieu. We note that no archaeologist or anthropologist we are aware of directly views the sociological tradition as rele­vant to understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens. Yet their rich, speculative accounts of those who carried out the burial at Sungir and those who executed the extraordinary cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet are fully consistent with collaborative meaning making as the defining quality assigned to modern humans by a long line of sociologists.
Weber viewed humans as voracious meaning makers and collaborative sym­bolists. The ability of one person to understand another was the source of all of social life for Weber (1978) and indeed provided the justification for the various forms of organization that people fashioned. For Weber, meanings were of three sorts: purposive/rational, traditional, and value oriented. The people who made up a given society used these shared meanings to justify their actions in all social circumstances. Durkheim (1995) noted that religion provided people with an explanation of their place in the world and a set of understandings that helped them cope with the uncertainties of life. In this sense, religion provided a sancti­fied affirmation and expression of the collective. Mead (1934), whose theory we draw on substantively for our conception of social skill, saw language and social­ization as the mechanisms that provided each of us with a sense of self and the ability to take the role of the "other.” He saw the essence of human sociability as bound up with the capacity for empathy and the ability to use this capacity to get others to cooperate on the basis of shared understandings. Later theorists, in­cluding such important figures for us as Berger and Luckmann (1967) and Bourdieu (1977,1984), have built on these insights and expanded their usage in
different contexts. It is useful for us to be explicit about the link we see between these foundational sociological ideas and our emerging understanding of the rise of truly modem humans. We pick up our evolutionary tale at the “moment” of language acquisition.
For all the obvious benefits that flowed from the language/consciousness “package,” however, our evolutionary inheritance came with a cost. In liberating us from a primarily materialist existence, language/consciousness endowed humans with art, symbolic thought, and expanded reason but also new fears and threatening forms of awareness. These were two sides of the same coin. We regard existential fear and uncertainty as an unintended evolutionary by-product of whatever mix of genetic and/or anatomical changes triggered the cultural ex­plosion of 50,000 years ago. What do we mean by “existential fear and uncer­tainty?” We refer to the proverbial “meaning of life” questions that only modern humans seem capable of asking. Only the most stubbornly nonreflective person can, from time to time, avoid the nagging, if generally inchoate, sense that his or her life is accidental, without inherent purpose, and destined to end in death. The philosopher Thomas Nagel (1986) terms these fears the “outer perspective,” that state of detached reflection on what would appear at times to be the de- pressingly obvious “truths” about the human condition. According to Nagel, the capacity to stand outside and reflect on our situation is the basis for the “outer perspective” and the threatening mix of vertigo and fear that accompanies it.
Where exactly does this capacity come from? It is impossible to say for sure. Perhaps it is simply our greater capacity for abstract thought that allows us to formulate these questions. We are more inclined, however, to stress a strong link between language and these new fears. Language grants us the linguistic tools to make of ourselves an object. Instead of being the “I,” the unconscious subject, the spontaneous actor, we can now step outside of ourselves and become “me,” the object of our own reflection (Mead 1934). This is heady stuff and, if we can trust Mead and a host of others, the foundation for all role taking and thus the key to all those social skills that rest on our ability to “take the role of the other.” We will have more to say about this later in the chapter. But this ability to stand outside of ourselves may well also be the source of our existential fears.
Our existential fears are thus rooted in the intimations of aloneness and meaninglessness made possible by our newfound capacity for expanded self-consciousness. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that our attempts to escape from these fears typically involve efforts to overcome or lose self-consciousness. Nietzsche (1988: 52-53), for instance, described the Christian desire for “re­demption” as “the essence of all Christian needs ... it is the most persuaded, most painful affirmation of it in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wants to get rid of himself.” Similarly, the timeless appeal of a love relationship would seem to rest on the desire to lose oneself in another. In general, the effectiveness of any collaborative existential project rests in its ability to inhibit self-consciousness by embedding the individual in a system of socially con­structed meanings that substitutes the reassuring subjectivity of the “inner view” for the alienating effects of the “outer perspective.” It is the meaningful worlds we fashion in concert with others that insulate us from the threat of the “outer per­spective” and confirm our own significance.
This is what we mean by the “existential function” of the social. For most of us, most of the time, the latent threat of the outer perspective is held in check by the lived experience of the “inner perspective.” Our daily lives are typically grounded in the unshakable conviction that no one’s life is more important than our own and that the world is an inherently meaningful place. But one does not will this inner view into existence of his or her own accord. It is instead a collab­orative product, bom of the everyday reciprocal meaning making, identity con­ferring efforts we engage in with those around us. In this we function as existential “coconspirators,” relentlessly—if generally unconsciously—exchanging affirma­tions that sustain our sense of our own significance and the world s inherent meaningfulness.
It would be hard not to see the elaborate burials that suddenly appear in the archaeological record at the time of the “explosion” as the quintessence of this kind of collective existential project. Consider again the interment at Sungir that we described above. Tattersall (1998:11) describes sites like Sungir as “the most ancient incontrovertible evidence for the existence of religious experience.” What are religions, at root, but elaborated worldviews and belief systems that offer reassuring answers to all those threatening questions. Are we alone? No, we are part of a special community of the faithful, a “chosen people,” if you will. Is life meaningless? No, through our community we have privileged access to knowledge that renders the world a profoundly meaningful place. What of death? Do we cease to exist when we die? No, provided the community offers the appropriate ritual response, the deceased is assured of life after death. If death represents the most threatening embodiment of the “outer perspective,” then a shared belief in an afterlife and collaborative practices designed to ensure its realization represent a powerful collective refutation of the threat. The elabo­rate and extraordinarily labor-intensive behaviors reflected in the Sungir inter­ment speak eloquendy to the emergence of the existential in the human experience. There is simply no narrow instrumental survival function served by such rituals. The thousands of hours devoted to straightening tusks and making and sewing beads could, after all, have gone into hunting, food preparation, shel­ter construction, or countless other activities directly linked to group survival. And why bury valuable goods and foodstuffs with the deceased when they could be used or consumed by the living? They did so because the binding, existential beliefs of the collective required it.
Let us be clear. We are not for a minute suggesting that all of the new behav­iors that followed from the cultural explosion of 50,000 years ago speak to the existential motivations touched on here. Endowed with language and expanded consciousness, modem humans behaved the way they did primarily because they could not do otherwise. That is, they were now adapted to meaning making, communication, coordination, symbolic activity, and so on. This is simply what modem humans do. They also engaged in these new activities because they were instrumentally very effective. As noted above, there were great material advan­tages to be gained from their newfound capacity to communicate with each other and plan and carry out increasingly complex collaborative activities. Hunting or foraging expeditions could range over broader areas and involve more people. Productive roles within the group could (and, judging from the archaeological evidence, did) become more specialized, yielding survival gains for the collective. We could add other examples, but the point should be clear. Many of the new behaviors should be seen as trial and error efforts to devise more effective solutions to practical problems confronting the group. While Neanderthals survived by adapting the same general tool kit to a broad range of environments and climactic conditions, modem humans—by virtue of their new evolutionary endowments—became (and remain) relentless innovators.
In short, the materialist essence of human life was no less compelling after the cultural leap than it had been before. It is just that a second, quite different, social function/activity was now evident in the archaeological record. It would be a mistake, however, to see the material and existential functions of the social as separate from each other or to attribute preeminence to one or the other. Marx famously characterized religion “as the opiate of the masses,” insisting that beliefs and ideologies (read: the existential aspects of the social) were dependent upon and indeed an expression of the underlying material logic of society. We dis­agree. In our view, the human capacity and need for meaning and identity is as much a structuring force in social life as the material demands on the collective. It is precisely because modern humans need and are relendess in their efforts to fashion shared meanings (like Christianity) and identities (like being a Chris­tian) to restrain existential doubt that these constructions are available to those (like capitalists) who would appropriate and exploit them for their own pur­poses. In short, the material/instrumental and the existential are inextricably linked. Even as strategic actors are working to advance their interests, they are simultaneously exercising the distinctive human capacity for meaning making and the construction of collective identities. People do what they do both to achieve instrumental advantage and to fashion meaningful worlds for them­selves and others. This, we will argue, is as true today as ever. Any adequate theory of human strategic action must take this mix of instrumental and existential motives into account.
There is, however, an interesting and important difference between instru­mental and existential motives in our comparative awareness of the two. That is, in representing modern humans as “voracious meaning makers,” as relentless existential actors, we are not claiming that we behave in this way with all that much conscious awareness of our “true” motives. How can we explain this gen­eral lack of awareness of our need and proclivity for existential projects? Indeed, there would almost seem to be a contradiction inherent in asserting that exis­tential doubt/fear is a central motivating force in social life and yet produces little conscious awareness on the part of the individual actor. How can we be motivated to act on the basis of motives of which we are only dimly aware? One need not be a Freudian to believe such a thing possible. Two factors help resolve this apparent contradiction. The first is simply our typically inchoate experi­ence of existential doubt. If the devout generally sense the divine via litde more than “rumors of angels” (Berger 1990), then most of us only apprehend the threat of aloneness and meaninglessness in fleeting moments of dread and despair for which we have few words and fewer explanations. Lacking structure and coherence, these moments are not quite real and therefore generally elude full consciousness.
Just as important, the fears sensed in these moments are sufficiently threat­ening as to encourage their suppression. As Nyberg (1993: 83), writes, people seem to “know very well that we need hope to survive, that there are things we must strive not to know, even if that attitude looks to others like denial or self- deception.” Since our basic existential fears threaten hope, most of us “strive not to know them.” We do this, not only through individual denial, but by “investing” in collaborative existential projects that assert the orderly, purposive nature of the world. Indeed, the viability of these projects is directly related to our capacity for denial. Nothing poses a greater threat to our beliefs than a conscious awareness of the existential motives underlying them. How much more meaningful to marry for love than for existential assurance How much more satisfying to find religion through the redeeming grace of Christ than as a conscious hedge against the abyss. With all due respect to Pascal, it is not simply unseemly to profess a belief in God as a kind of existential side bet but patently ineffective as well. To do so is to acknowledge the self-interested, constructed nature of “faith,” thereby leaving the issue of existential doubt unresolved and denying oneself the comfort that “true faith” affords. Faith as a cognitive and emotional commitment to the demands of any existential project would appear to rest on precisely this combi­nation of self-interest and social construction, but to be effective these motiva­tional and sociological dynamics must remain opaque. The effectiveness of any meaning project, then, rests on a kind of existential sleight of hand. Even as people are working purposefully to fashion and sustain meaningful social orders, they must simultaneously experience this as something other than their handiwork.
We close this section with an important aside. After rereading what we wrote, we were struck by the generally “upbeat” tone of this section. To be sure, we acknowledged that the language/consciousness "package” that serves as the physiological basis for the existential function of the social was a two-edged sword, conferring great evolutionary advantages while simultaneously bur­dening the species with new fears and threatening forms of awareness. But in emphasizing our voracious capacity for meaning making, we could be read as arguing that existential despair is really no match for the cultural creativity of the species, that our worst fears and doubts inevitably succumb to the collective un­derstandings and identities that sustain us. In point of fact, the existential "under toad” is a formidable opponent, inflicting despair, loneliness, anomie on all of us at one time or another, sometimes with tragic consequences.
But this admission constitutes only one aspect of the "darker” side of the per­spective on offer here. Indeed, there are several other sobering implications of the argument. We will confine ourselves to just one other. Even when the forces of collective meaning and identity triumph over existential doubt and despair, they often do so by investing deeply in conflict with other groups and their asso­ciated meaning projects. Beginning with Simmel (1955), sociologists have long recognized the "functions of social conflict” (Coser 1956). Mead (1934) was quite aware that the valorizing existential projects of groups could contain an element of "us” versus "them” where "they” were defined as "heathens,” "sav­ages,” "infidels,” or some other evil or dangerous collective requiring eradication.
Answers to the most basic existential questions often seem clearest during wartime or at other times of savage social conflict. Who am I? I am a holy warrior doing battle with an evil enemy. What does it all mean? It is a cosmic battle between good (us) and evil (them). However we might recoil in value terms from Nazism, it is critically important to our perspective that we recognize just how profoundly meaningful the movement was to its adherents. Hitler was nothing if not a supremely skilled social actor adept at fashioning unambiguous "truths” that valorized the lives of believers and sanctified their presence in the world. In doing so, his is only an extreme example of the opposition between the existential and material functions of the social that is unique to our species. That is, conflict is sufficiently attractive as a source of meaning and identity that we appear willing to destroy each other to achieve its existential benefits.

Social Skill

If the genetic and/or anatomical changes that occurred 45,000-50,000 years ago were responsible for burdening modern humans with new existential fears and challenges, they also afforded us the mental, linguistic, and social skills needed
to respond to these threats. Central to our perspective is the concept of “social skill ,” that complex mix of cognitive, affective, and linguistic facilities that render individuals more or less effective as skilled strategic actors supremely well adapted to the demands of collective action. Drawing on the distinctive micro­foundations sketched above, we want to use the balance of the chapter to expli­cate the concept of social skill as a necessary prerequisite for what is to follow in later chapters.
Our goal is to provide a distinctly sociological understanding that uses the existential capacity and need for meaning and membership as the core for un­derstanding how people create and sustain mesolevel social worlds. We argue that the need for meaning is at the basis of peoples efforts to get and sustain collective action. But in order to have meaning function in this way, it is necessary to have a model of what people do in their everyday interactions in strategic ac­tion fields to produce collective action and create such meaning. Such a model must posit a Homo sociologicus, who requires meaning as the ground of his or her being and achieves that meaning by engaging in collaborative action with others. At the risk of redundancy, we reiterate a crucially important point made above. In stressing the central importance of meaning making in group life, we are not for a minute suggesting that issues of power, interests, and status are somehow marginal to our perspective. They are anything but. But seeking out instrumental gain, social status, and power are inherently linked to the problem of meaning. We seek out these things because we want to prove to ourselves and others that we are worthy as people. In doing so, they provide us with meaning and the sense that our lives have purpose. By “winning,” we confirm to ourselves and others that life is not meaningless (or at least we manage to keep that doubt at bay). Meaning making is inextricably bound up with the contests for power, status, and other interests.
In order to make sense of what people actually do to attain collective action, we introduce the notion of social skill. Social skill can be defined as the ability to induce cooperation by appealing to and helping to create shared meanings and collective identities. Skilled social actors empathetically relate to the situations of other people and, in doing so, are able to provide those people with reasons to cooperate (Goffman 1959,1974; Mead 1934). Skilled social actors must under­stand how the sets of actors in their group view their multiple conceptions of interest and identity and how those in external groups do as well. They use these understandings to provide an interpretation of a given situation and to frame courses of action that appeal to existing interests and identities. Their appeals elicit cooperation from members of their group and produce generally negative accounts of the identity of those with whom the group is competing.
Part of what creates and sustains fields is the ongoing use of social skill by actors. Ad fields require the active participation of individuals and groups to continue to function. This raises the question of how groups are held together and how action in a strategic action field is structured. Everyone who is a mem­ber of a social group derives existential benefits from being in the group. It is on the basis, and very often in defense, of these benefits that group members collab­orate with one another and compete with those with alternative views of the strategic action field.
People routinely deploy social skill as part of a meaning making project. They do so with a mix of motives. Of course, they might gain materially from their actions and this might be one of their core motives. But people engage in collective action for less clearly instrumental reasons as well. Creating or affirm­ing shared meanings and identities through collaborative action is among the most satisfying and affirming of human activities. Being part of a group and reveling in the lived experience of “we-ness” is one of the most important ways that individuals come to have a positive view of themselves and hold their exis­tential fears at bay. Having a successful marriage or relationship, raising chil­dren, cooperating with others at work, all provide us with the sense that life is meaningful and we play an important part in it. From this perspective, there is a false distinction between instrumental and altruistic action. Collaborative meaning making sounds very altruistic, but it is also the ground of all collective instrumental action.
The concept of social skill is rooted for us in symbolic interactionism (Goff- man 1959,1974; Joas 1996; Mead 1934). Actors’ conceptions of themselves are powerfully shaped by their interactions with others. When interacting, actors try to create a positive sense of self by fashioning shared meanings and identities for themselves and others. Identities refer to sets of meanings that actors have that define who they are and what they want in a particular situation. Actors in dominant positions who are efficacious and successful may have high self­esteem. Actors in dominated positions maybe stigmatized and forced to engage in coping strategies to contest their stigmatization (Goffman 1963).
Mead (1934) argues that some social actors are better than others at inducing cooperation. This is because they are able to create a positive sense of self that resonates with others. We say that these actors are more socially skilled. Skilled social actors produce meaning for others, because by doing so, they produce meaning for themselves. Their sense of efficacy comes, not from some narrow conception of self-interest (although skilled actors tend to benefit materially from their skill) but from the act of inducing cooperation and helping others attain ends. They will do whatever it takes to induce cooperation and if one path is closed off, they will explore others. This means that skilled social actors are neither narrowly self-interested nor motivated by fixed goals. They generally do not have individual fixed interests but instead focus on evolving collective ends. They keep their goals somewhat open-ended and are prepared to take what the system will give. This more open stance toward the world and their own aims means that skilled strategic actors often behave very differently than ideal type rational actors, who are narrowly pursuing their own fixed interests and goals in some contest with others.
As Giddens (1984) has pointed out, all human beings are capable of skilled social performances. They need to be somewhat socially skilled in order to sur­vive. But we all know people who are more socially skilled than others, that is, have the ability to get others to cooperate. They appear in universities, politics, and the world of business. Sometimes they are leaders or managers in that they hold formal positions of power, but sometimes they do not. The assertion, here, is only that some people are more capable at taking the role of the other and using this intersubjective understanding of others to fashion shared meanings and identities to mobilize collective strategic action.
Skilled strategic actors mostly find themselves in fields that are already struc­tured. As a result they often do not have much choice as to their position in the field, the resources available to them, or the opportunities they might have to either reproduce or change their situation. Still, even within these constraints, skilled actors have considerable latitude for action. If they are in incumbent groups, they will use their skill to maintain group solidarity, to sustain and affirm the shared identities and meanings that undergird the collective, and, in general, to maintain the status and material advantages enjoyed by group members. If they are in challenger groups, their social skills may be sorely tested but still po­tentially very consequential. In such situations skilled actors seek to maintain solidarity and a positive collective identity in the face of lots of challenges. From a more narrowly strategic perspective, they must continue to fashion lines of action that maintain what opportunities they have while searching to exploit any emerging vulnerabilities they discern in their opponents. Social skill may be a property of individuals, but the use of social skill is heavily constrained by the individuals position within the field in question. That is, successful deployment of social skill will depend on the actor recognizing her or his social position, being able to take the perspective of other actors (both those with whom they are trying to cooperate and those with whom they are competing), and finding a set of actions that “make sense” given their position. One way of thinking about this is that one needs to separate out the role a person occupies in a particular strategic action field from the ability of the person to enact that role and effect an outcome.
Much of sociology wants either to reduce people to positions in social struc­ture (thereby denying them the ability to be self-aware actors) or alternatively to view them as highly agentic, at every moment creating and re-creating society whether they know it or not. The theory of social skill and its relationship to the theory of fields implies that both the individual skills actors have and the positions they occupy in social space affect their ability to engage in coopera­tion, competition, and collective action. Action depends on both the structural position and opportunities actors have and their ability to recognize how they can mobilize others in order to maximize their chances for both narrowly instru­mental and broader existential gain. In any given situation, actors’ ability to improve their group’s situation may be highly or minimally constrained by their position in the structure. Either way, the challenge will be to use their social skill to exploit whatever opportunities maybe available to them. They must also con­tinue to motivate others and provide meaning and identity to sustain group sol­idarity and morale.
It is useful to elaborate more clearly how we deploy the idea of social skill in our argument and how it differs from more rationalist arguments. The concept of social skill helps solve three important problems in our theory of fields. First, it provides a microfoundation for the theory as a whole. For all our objections to rational choice theory, we have long admired the stark set of behavioral assump­tions on which the perspective rests. The essence of human social life, according to proponents of the theory, is rational calculus and action in pursuit of narrowly instrumental ends.
In contrast, for us, the essence of human sociability is collaborative meaning making. This is not to deny the more narrowly instrumental/material ground of human existence. It’s just that, for us, the material and the existential cannot be disentangled. For starters, material ends are always conceived by, and enacted through, groups. Without participating in groups, there would be no material rewards. The meaning projects of fields are what allow groups to function and pursue and distribute rewards. This is because the act of creating material objects requires collective action. And collective action requires identity and meaning in order to convince individuals that they are part of something real, important, and tied to their “interests.” The existential projects of groups help explain a number of key features of social life that rational accounts take for granted. For all its heuristic appeal, individuals are rarely, if ever, calculating outsiders. Even the most selfish of “loners” is motivated by ends that are, at root, collective con­structions. They seek out affirmation of their worth by striving to get what others have. They seek out the admiration of those whose respect they crave and seek to punish those who are their enemies. Further, these individuals are generally obliged to pursue these aims within collectives in consort with others.
This brings us to our second point. In rational actor models, individual partic­ipation in collective action can never be taken for granted. Indeed, the default option for rational actors is to refrain from collective action and resist collective commitments that might impede their ability to realize their ends. This tendency to “free ride” can only be overcome, we are told, when organizers provide selec­tive incentives that make it rational for individuals to affiliate with the group or
action in question. In short, collective entanglements only make sense if they aid the individual in realizing narrow instrumental aims. Our stress on the existen­tial functions of the social leads us to embrace a starkly opposing view. For us, affiliation with groups and other collectives is a highly desired end in and of itself. Ultimately the central sources of meaning and identity in our lives can only be conferred by collectives. Accordingly much of our social skill is deployed in the service of fashioning and safeguarding these collective existential projects.
This leads us to our third and final point. By focusing on social skill, our theory shifts the emphasis from motives to action and the contributions that skilled actors make to the emergence, maintenance, and transformation of social orders. This runs counter to almost all social theorizing that begins with individ­uals reacting, in a self-interested way, to their positions in social structure. So, for example, in Bourdieu s theory of the habitus, the most sophisticated current the­oretical view of the link between individuals and social structure, individuals’ reaction to a particular situation depends upon their position in a particular field, the resources available to them, and their perception of strategic options based on socialization and lived experience.
In our theory, however, actors are never simply self-interested. Most of us, most of the time, are motivated to affirm our membership in this or that group— for example, family member, employee, congregant—by helping to reproduce the order in question. Admittedly sometimes we do so with an eye to preserving the narrow instrumental goods conferred by these collectives, but most of the time we are simply expressing our affiliation with the group, preserving and extending its identity, and generally honoring its existential hold on us.

Social Skill in Action

Having gone to pains to show how our foundational sense of human sociability informs our conception of social skill, we want to turn in this section to a much more focused discussion of some of the forms of socially skilled action that we see routinely deployed in fields. We see all of these forms of action as reflecting not only the deployment of social skill but also, at a deeper level, the motivating force of the existential function of the social.
The literature has identified a number of important tactics that socially skilled actors use to engage in cooperative and competitive behavior in groups (Bourdieu 1977; Coleman 1986; DiMaggio 1988; Fligstein 1996, 2001a; Goff- man 1959,1974; Leifer 1988; Nee and Ingram 1998; Padgett and Ansell 1993; White 1992). The basic problem for skilled social actors is to frame "stories” that help induce cooperation from people by appealing to their identity, belief, and interests, while at the same time using those same stories to frame actions against
various opponents. This is the general problem of framing that Goffman (1974) identifies. These stories are sometimes about meaning and membership, that is, existential issues and questions of group identity, and sometimes about “what’s in it for me.”
One of the most important vehicles for framing is the direct authority to tell someone what to do. Long ago Weber (1978) noted that authority was the prob­ability that a direct command was obeyed based on the position of legitimacy of the person giving the command. By holding a position in a particular social group, actors will find it easier to attain cooperation from others. But even if one has a formal position in a group, one must still induce cooperation in subordi­nates (Barnard 1938). This means there has to be a broader repertoire of other tactics that skilled actors use in order to structure interactions with those within and across groups.
Agenda setting is the ability to set the parameters of the discussion for others (Kingdon 1995; Lukes 1974). If a skilled actor can get others to accept what the terms of discussion are, much of the batde has been won. Agenda setting is usu­ally attained by behind-the-scenes action to convince multiple actors and groups that a particular agenda is in their interests. When the groups meet, the agenda is set, the terms of discussion are set, and the identity and interests of actors are framed. This ensures that actors have to come to understand their interests within certain bounds, thus closing off many other courses of possible action.
Skilled actors understand the ambiguities and uncertainties of the field and work off of them. They have a sense of what is possible and impossible. If the situation provides opportunities that are unplanned but might result in some gain, skilled actors will grab them, even if they are not certain as to the usefulness or the gain. This is a pragmatic, open-ended approach to strategic action that is akin to what Levi-Strauss calls “bricolage” (1966). It follows that skilled actors will take what the system will give at any moment, even if it is not exactly what they or others might ideally want.
Indeed, skilled social actors often end up convincing others that what they can get is what they want. In order to do this, skilled actors have to convince others who do not necessarily share interests that what will occur is consistent with their identity and interest. This can be done by selling groups on some over­riding values that all accept or convincing them that what will happen will serve their narrow interest, at least to a degree. Since interests and preferences can be formed as fields form, it is necessary to link broader frames to groups’ existing conceptions of interest.
The skilled social actor will engage in brokering more than blustering (Gould 1993). This works in two ways. First, strategic actors present themselves as neu­tral in a situation, acting as if they are simply trying to mediate the interests of others. Second, strategic actors present themselves as more active in selling the group collective identity and appealing to others to find a way to get people to go along. Their solution is sold either to help keep the peace or to ensure that the field does not collapse. To be a broker, skilled actors have to convince others that they are not motivated by narrow self-interest and will gain personally from finding a negotiated solution.
Since the goal of skilled action is to attain cooperation from others, socially skilled actors often appear hard to read and devoid of interests of their own (this is what Leifer 1988 and Padgett and Ansell 1993 have called “robust action”). Opposition can quickly mobilize against someone who appears to want some­thing for narrow individual gain. On the other hand, if someone appears open to others’ needs and not wedded to any particular course of action, others will very likely find the situation more conducive to negotiation or other forms of cooper­ative action.
One main problem for socially skilled actors is to find a way to link actors or groups with widely different preferences and help reorder those preferences. This aggregation process, once it gets going, can take on a life of its own. Once a number of actors come on board, others will likely follow. The trick is to bring enough on board to set in motion the proverbial bandwagon effect. This is most frequendy done by fashioning a resonant collective identity (Ansell 2001). Such an identity allows groups to attach their divergent interests to a common project.
Skilled actors will be pursuing a number of lines of action going simulta­neously. Many of these—perhaps most of them—will peter out or fail to mate­rialize. But as long as these aborted lines of action are not viewed as serious failures, all one needs is a few successful lines of action, or victories, to convince others to come along. After the fact, other actors or groups will likely only remember the successes even if one had to try various lines of action to get a few to work. Part of this illusion of action is to try and convince others that their vi­sion contains more reality than they might think. If you can convince others that they have more power or control to get others to go along, then once something gets set in motion, others will fall in line.
Another common ploy of strategic actors is getting others to believe that some line of action was actually their idea. If the ploy works, the payoff is tre­mendous commitment to the initiative by the nominal architect of the plan. A related tactic has the skilled actor setting up situations in which others are subdy encouraged to take the lead and buy into what they have come to believe was their idea. By getting actors who are relatively isolated to cooperate and con­vincing them that their cooperation was their idea, the strategic actor gets others to cooperate without appearing Machiavellian.
Padgett and Ansell (1993) have argued that a good way to secure coopera­tion with disparate groups is to make alliances with people with few other choices or isolate particularly difficult outliers. The preferable action is to
include as many outliers as possible into the field and gain agreement on an overarching worldview and collective identity. One good way to do this is to be the node that connects these outliers to the network. Then, the skilled actor is the source of information and coalition building. Occasionally, certain actors or groups are so disruptive that the best tactic is to isolate them. Even if there are a number of upset but isolated actors, they generally remain disorganized. Since these types of actors are usually incapable of strategic action themselves, they remain isolates.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have parsed the rich literature on human evolution to offer a highly speculative, sensitizing perspective on the origins of what we have termed the "existential function of the social”; that "moment” when collaborative sym­bolic activity assumed central importance in social life. The intent was to pro­vide at least the bare bones of a microfoundation for the theory being developed here. We have linked this underlying microfoundation to strategic action in fields via the concept of social skill; that is, the ways in which skilled actors use empathy and the capacity to fashion and strategically deploy shared meanings and identities in the service of institutional projects within fields.
The theory of social skill and fields is applicable to a range of sociological phenomena that share common characteristics. The subfields in sociology that are best analyzed from this perspective are concerned with organized groups that have a reason to set up rules for a particular social space. The social phe­nomena in which self-conscious actors strive to organize groups toward collec­tive ends include institutional politics, religion, social movements, the economy in which firms and governments create markets, and the nonprofit sector of cap­italist economies. All of these arenas of action contain actors who seek to con­struct institutions to guide their interactions in order that they might forward their existential and material interests. They want to create new social spaces where their groups can dominate or prosper. In all of these empirical terrains, we observe formal organizational rules, laws, and informal practices being used to guide interaction. Now, of course, the goals of actors are very different across states, markets, religion, the nonprofit sector, and social movements. But in all of these arenas, we see actors striving to attain cooperation within their groups and to stabilize interactions across groups.
Our claim that the framework on offer here applies to most public arenas or institutional spheres in modern society is intended to be quite provocative. While some scholars have gestured toward a more general theory of institu­tional action, few have tried to broaden the scope of their own theorizing to
accommodate phenomena as diverse as those touched on above (for an at­tempt, see Powell 1991). Our stress on the centrality of meaning making and its expression in the form of social skill implies that in both settled and unset­tled fields, the competing meaning projects of groups will structure the inter­actions both within and across groups. Since even in settled strategic action fields there will be contestation, we expect that some group of individuals will always be trying to change the definition of the situation and the meanings that inform action in the field. This will result in ongoing change to the nature of group interaction, the meanings for actors, and the positions of groups and individuals. In less settled times, we expect that the possibilities for innovative action will increase. New identities, new political coalitions, and even new strategic action fields can emerge. Social skill in both cases is what bridges the gap between what individuals are doing and the structures and logics that result from their efforts.
With these foundational underpinnings in hand, we would like to close the chapter by offering some additional clarifying comments on the concept of social skill before briefly revisiting the metaperspective on human sociability with which we opened the chapter. We begin with a conundrum related to the distribution of social skill across social space.
Our perspective rests on the assumption that socially skilled actors exist in every field. They are equally likely to populate incumbent and challenger groups. If socially skilled actors exist both in incumbent and challenger groups, one could argue that whatever advantage skill might convey, it would be offset by the presence of equally skilled actors in the other group—leaving the incumbent in a dominant position. Indeed, this is frequently the case and we have no problem acknowledging that very often the social skill of challengers and incumbents is roughly equal, allowing the contest to be decided on the basis of the superior resources and/or political endowments of the latter. But even if the overall struc­ture of the field remains largely unchanged, skill may still make a difference. Even in the most stable of fields, we can expect to see constant jockeying for advantage and efforts to marginally improve ones position in the strategic action field. Social skill will be important to these as well as to major convulsive moments in the life of a field.
Then again, there are those “convulsive moments.” At such times, strategic action fields are unstable and present new opportunities for challengers to better their positions. It is at these moments that the ability of socially skilled actors to mobilize resources and to frame innovative lines of action to secure cooperation may prove decisive. Challengers who are more attuned to moments when their position might be significantly improved will work diligently to locate and exploit such opportunities. Quite simply, we expect the role of social skill to be more decisive in situations of greater field flux than in relatively stable times.
Still, the role of social skill and the ultimate outcome of field contention in such moments remain unpredictable and depend not just on the distribution of social skill across groups but also on resource endowments, political allies, and events in other proximate fields. We could imagine a situation in which similarly sized and resourced groups face off and the superior social skills of one of the combatants lead to the defeat of the other. But we can also imagine cases in which the resource endowments of the groups are really not so equal and the more advantaged group prevails independent of differences in social skill. Lots of other outcomes are possible as well, depending on the mix of fac­tors noted above.
The problem of determining when social skill is decisive in the way that a field becomes organized or in the ability of challenger groups to improve their posi­tions is mostly a question of empirical analysis. But what our perspective does say is that it is always important for actors to be mobilized, even strong incum­bent actors. Thus, the problem of using social skill and using it effectively is always an issue in strategic action fields. The constant jockeying for position and the piecemeal changes in strategic action fields very much reflect skilled social actors looking for an edge, any edge, and occasionally changing the nature of their position in the fields.
Even small changes can sometimes be turned into larger changes if multiple groups align with an innovative new collective identity or collective action frame. Social skill depends on the ability of actors to transcend their narrow worldview, take the position of the “other,” and figure out how either to get the “other” to cooperate or to effectively blunt or counter the “other s” advantages. This dynamic within strategic action fields is on ongoing part of the game. It only makes sense that most of the time in setded strategic action fields, incumbents can reproduce their advantage primarily through superior resources or the actions of internal governance units or other political allies. Even settled strate­gic action fields have moments of turbulence, however, presenting socially skilled actors with opportunities to successfully challenge even the most entrenched incumbents.
We would like to close the chapter where we began, by underscoring the dis­tinctive microfoundation on which our general perspective rests. In truth, most sociologists have little or nothing to say about the fundamental behavioral as­sumptions that ground their work. Implicitly, however, we think we discern two very different metatheoretical perspectives lurking behind most sociological scholarship. In the distinct minority are rationalists who see calculus and indi­vidual/collective interests as the driving force in social life. Juxtaposed to the rationalists are most sociologists who embrace one or another version of what Dennis Wrong (1961) long ago termed the “oversocialized conception of man.” The actual microfoundations of this view have never really been articulated, but that has not stopped the perspective from being broadly modal within the disci­pline. What do we mean by the “oversocialized conception of man?” We simply mean that most sociologists stress the critical importance of various forms of social influence—norms, socialization, collective identity, social scripts, “taken for granted” organizational routines—in shaping human social life.
As card-carrying sociologists, we would never deny the power of such influ­ences in social life. But in asserting the distinctive microfoundations spelled out earlier, we part company from most of our disciplinary brethren in two signifi­cant ways. First, we seek not to simply assert the power of social influence but to account for it. We maintain that the tendency of humans to hew to social norms, to conform to group pressures, reflects nothing so much as the existential func­tions of the social. That is, our desire to belong and to believe that the world is an ordered, meaningful reality renders us susceptible to social influence. By con­forming to group norms we affirm membership and meaning and, in turn, restrain existential doubt.
This latter account differs from most generic sociological perspectives in a second sense. By seeing humans as possessing both the capacity and the need to engage in collective meaning making, we are asserting a much more active, agen- tic view of social life than would appear common in sociology. The image im­plicit in most sociological work is that of unconscious conformity to norms or adherence to “taken for granted” routines. If humans are inclined to accommo­date various forms of social influence—and we certainly think they are—we see them doing so much more thoughtfully and with conscious regard for the mate­rial and existential stakes involved in their actions. This more active, purposive view of the species is consistent with our stress on social skill and the active fash­ioning, stabilization, and transformation of strategic action fields.
From the micro we now turn to the other extreme. Having explicated a micro­foundation to help account for the capacities and motivations that shape strate­gic action within fields, we now seek to place those fields in the broadest possible macrocontext. For if certain species capacities shape contention in strategic action fields, they do so in response to constraints and opportunities that arise outside of the field as much as dynamics internal to it.

[1] We need to make two clarifying points here. First, we are not suggesting that prior to the ex­plosion of 45,000-50,000 years ago our human ancestors lacked any conception of group identify or shared understandings of the world. They dearly did not. Groups that were fashioning tools and hunting collaboratively clearly had to share both an inchoate sense of “groupness” and enough collective knowledge—of tool making techniques, differentiated roles during a hunt, and so on—to survive in often harsh environments. It is just that all of these shared understandings seem to have derived from, and been overwhelmingly deployed in the service of, the material functions of the social. The capacity for meaning making as an end in itself appears to be only lightly developed prior to the explosion. Second, we are certainly aware that the greatly expanded capacity for collaboration and meaning making carried with it extraordinary evolutionary advantages that enhanced the survival chances of modern humans—at least in the short run. That said, it seems just as clear that many of the new ritual and artistic behaviors that followed in the wake of the explosion conferred no direct survival advantage on the group. Among the earliest known examples of jewelry is a collection of delicate beads made from ostrich eggs, taken from a Kenyan site—Enkapune Ya Muto—that dates to 40,000 years ago. “Their maker shaped the crude, circular pieces from fragments of ostrich eggshells, thinning each one and drilling a hole through the center. Many of them broke before they were fin­ished. An unknown Stone Age artisan spent hours crafting these decorations rather than searchingforfood, tending children, or making tools” (Leslie 2002:57; emphasis added).