The Social Field: Vertebrate Life and the Architecture of Alignment: 2 Gelada Baboons: Layered Alliance as Relational Architecture

How nested social structures emerge as stratified readiness fields rather than hierarchies of agents.

Gelada baboons sit precisely at the fault line where vertebrate sociality begins to fold in on itself, layering perspectives into nested alliance structures.

Where a herd enacts a single inclination field, geladas weave multiple overlapping fields at different scales—individual, dyadic, unit-level, band-level—each modulating the others.

Their social world is not a hierarchy and not a network.

It is an architecture of readiness, continuously recut by alliance, proximity, and shifting attentional alignment.

1. Partial Individuation Across Tiers: The Gelada Social Fabric

Gelada society is built from nested units:

• Reproductive units (one male, several females, offspring)

• All-male bachelor groups

• Clan-level aggregations (several units coordinated loosely)

• Bands that forage together

• Large herds that merge many bands in open landscapes

Rather than treating these as “levels of organisation,” we can view them as stability basins of perspectival alignment.

Inside a reproductive unit, perspectival alignment is tight:

shared vigilance, coordinated movement, predictable proximity, and fine-grained social responses.

At the band level, alignment is loose:

general movement direction, broad-scale vigilance, shared foraging patches.

Between these is a teeming middle zone where partial individuation is continually renegotiated—alliances form, dissolve, soften, or intensify.

The gelada social system is thus a stratified individuation field, not a hierarchy of fixed roles.

2. Inclination as Social Bias: Attention, Tension, and Trust

In geladas, inclination does not simply involve movement, as in a herd.

Inclination becomes social bias:

a shifting landscape of trust, suspicion, attraction, and alliance.

These biases are not internal states; they are relational gradients continuously shaped by:

• proximity

• grooming

• shared vigilance

• reproductive cycles

• male takeovers

• the history of past alliances

• the distribution of rivals in space

Every animal participates in multiple, overlapping inclination fields simultaneously:

• a proximity-based inclination field

• a rhythmic grooming-inclination field

• a vigilance-inclination field

• an antagonism-inclination field during male competition

• a maternal-coordination inclination field

The gelada world is a superposition of bias gradients, each partially aligning the perspectives of specific subsets of animals.

3. Emergent Ability: What Multi-Layer Alignment Makes Possible

When these inclination fields partially synchronise, new abilities emerge at the collective level:

• Coordinated predator detection across layers
  (unit-level vigilance nested in band-level vigilance)

• Conflict buffering
  (alliance webs diffuse tension before it escalates)

• Female coalition defence
  (multi-generational kinships stabilise the reproductive unit)

• Male takeover resistance
  (when several units align inclinations against an incoming male)

• Landscape-scale foraging coherence
  (bands spread efficiently without fragmenting)

Gelada society is therefore more than multi-layered structure; it is an architecture of enacted capacities that only exists when perspectives at each tier incline in mutually supportive ways.

4. Behaviour as Multi-Scale Construal

In herds, collective behaviour emerges from spatial movement.

In geladas, behaviour emerges from social construal—how each animal construes others in the relational field.

Every gelada’s interpretation of another’s movement or posture is a perspectival enactment that carries long-term consequences:

• a glance can shift tension

• a grooming attempt can recut alliance topology

• a refusal or retreat can rewire coalition availability

• a coordinated movement of several females can pre-empt male aggression

Through these micro-construals, geladas maintain a living architecture of readiness, continuously reshaped by interaction.

This produces a system in which no tier controls another; rather, constraints, expectations, and alignments propagate upward and downward simultaneously.

5. Individuation as Alliance Topology

Gelada individuality does not reduce to the animal itself.

An individual gelada is always also:

• the alliances it participates in

• the vigilance loops it contributes to

• the spatial rhythms it co-enacts

• the maternal lineage it extends

• the unit it stabilises

In this sense, individuation is network-shaped yet not reducible to graph theory: it is perspectival and dynamic.

A female’s individuality is inseparable from her coalition partners.

A male’s individuality is inseparable from the unit he attempts to hold.

A band’s identity is inseparable from the alignment patterns that hold its units in a loose coherence.

Geladas show us individuality as relational contour, not a skin-bound entity.

6. Social Worlds as Conditional Ontologies

Gelada society is coherent, but the coherence is layer-dependent:

• Tight within units

• Moderate within bands

• Loose within super-herds

• Episodic across male coalitions

The world they inhabit is a stack of relational orders that may strengthen or collapse depending on:

• ecological pressure

• predation

• seasonal change

• reproductive cycles

• demographic shifts

Gelada society is a temporarily stabilised ontology, enacted through the synchronisation of multiple readiness fields.

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Liora Vignette

Liora watched the geladas spread across the highland plateau like a tapestry unfurling. Each family moved with its own rhythm, yet their paths bent gently toward one another. The older females formed quiet constellations of allegiance; the males cast long shadows of tension and bravado; the young flickered between play and vigilance. It was not a hierarchy she saw but a layered architecture of leaning—alliances nested inside alliances, each perspective tilting the world in a slightly different way. And she realised that the plateau itself was held together by these shifting articulations of trust.