Chapter 96: Rural Worlds and Dunbar Limits

Many human institutions converge on small-to-medium group sizes: core ties, teams, neighbourhoods, villages. A natural explanation is a bounded capacity to maintain stable recognition relations. This chapter frames Dunbar-style limits as a carrier-capacity constraint on recognition topology: the cognitive and temporal resources available to an agent impose a ceiling on the number of morphisms that can be actively maintained. Rural and village forms illustrate how thick overlap norms and stable local coherence arise when group size stays within this bound.