Complexity and complicity in social anthropology

We often call societies with cities, literacy, and governments, “complex,” and small-scale societies “simple.” But in reality, everyday life in small societies is highly complex—people must constantly negotiate relationships, care, and conflict without many rules or tools to guide them. By contrast, in large societies, social roles, technologies, and hierarchies simplify routine interactions. To understand the challenges of social entanglements in non-state environments, and the uniformity and monotony of capitalist states, Hans proposes two concepts: complicity and commensuration. Creating complicity (implicit understandings shared by few) increases social complexity; whereas commensuration (comparison by unit and scale) enables social simplicity. Both processes are tied into each other, and to appreciate the complexity of doing things together, we must attend to emergent simplicity.