I am enjoying tremendously learning about this forager/hunter/farmer paradigm. I think it explains a lot, very simply.

As to this quote, though, might it be more a question of how "social coherence" is achieved? Intuitively, I wouldn't think that any group that lived at the subsistence level could afford to be too accommodating of "deviance."

On the other hand, the organizing ethic of all such groups was basically 'one for all and all for one' because that ethic maximized survival. It is also an ethic that invites cohesiveness.

To my mind, the existence of an ongoing surplus was the reason that farming led to the greater insistence on "hierarchy." It was needed to enforce social cohesion in the face of the changed societal paradigm that the existence of an ongoing surplus created: control of the surplus (in all its aspects) became the overweening societal issue. The symbiotic relationship between wealth and societal power and the inevitable concomitant, social classes, was born. (Not that I'm saying anything Marx didn't say.)