Reverse Dominance Hierarchy
Reverse dominance hierarchy is Christopher Boehm's account of forager egalitarianism: not the absence of a hierarchy but an inverted one, in which the rest of the group collectively dominates whoever would otherwise dominate them. Bullying, bragging and eager claims to authority are watched for and put down. The ethnographic pattern it describes is well documented among mobile foragers. The evolutionary claim built on it, that this was the default state of late Pleistocene societies, is disputed.
What it is
Boehm introduced the term in "Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy" in Current Anthropology in 1993, and expanded it in Hierarchy in the Forest in 1999.
The levelling devices are the substance of it: ridicule, gossip, refusal to cooperate, ostracism, and in the last resort coalitional sanction. What makes the hierarchy reversed rather than absent is that the coalition is doing the dominating, and it is doing it deliberately and with a target.
Paul Bingham's coalition enforcement theory, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology in 1999, supplies the enabling condition that Boehm's account needs. Without weapons that work at a distance, a coalition cannot punish a physically dominant individual at survivable risk, so strength decides. With them it can, and physical strength stops being the single most important thing about a hominid.