The Fabrication of Political & Economic Domination

RANDOM NOTES ON MY THEORY OF DOMINATION

OUTLINE

•POLECONOMICS

•AGENCY

•WHAT IS THE FABRICATION OF DOMINATION?

•COMPLEMENTARY DOMAINS IN THE EARLY DIVISION OF LABOR

•HORTICULTURE & THE NEOLITHIC DIVISION OF LABOR

•KINGSHIP AND THE RISE IN INEQUALITY

•ROYAL DEVIANCE

•IS EGALITARIANISM NATURAL?

•THE STIFLING OF INDIVIDUALISM THROUGH DOMINATION

•GOVERNMENT BY PERSUASION

•AGGRANDIZEMENT: A NATURAL TENDENCY

•MANIPULATING SOCIAL STRUCTURE

•PALEOLITHIC WARLESSNESS

•THE IMPORTANCE OF SEGMENTATION & HIERARCHY IN THE EMERGENCE OF WAR

•NEOLITHIC WARFARE

•THE CONQUEST & TRIBUTE PATTERN

•THE FABRICATION OF WARFARE BY AGGRANDIZERS

•THE NORTHWEST COAST POTLATCH AS COMPETITION

•THE CALUSA AMERINDIAN CASE: A NON-AGRICULTURAL CHIEFDOM

•WHAT CAUSES THE RISE OF STRATIFICATION?

•THE THEORETICAL IMPORTANCE OF STORAGE

•A COMPARISON OF SIMPLE NON-STORING FORAGERS WITH COMPLEX STORING FORAGERS

•THE SEDENTARY FORAGERS: CHUMASH OF CALIFORNIA

•THE SEDENTARY FORAGERS: SCANDINAVIA

•WOODBURN (1982) ON FORAGER EQUALITY (A SUMMARY)

•IMPORTANCE OF LAND

•GENDER INEQUALITY

•BIG MAN SOCIETIES

•ARCHITECTURE IN STORAGING SOCIETIES

•OPPORTUNITY & THE EMERGENCE OF RULES

•THE CREATION OF SYMBOLS OF POWER

•THE CREATION OF RITUALS OF POWER

•BORNU IN THE WESTERN SUDAN: THE PALACE ECONOMY

•MYCENAE: THE PALACE ECONOMY

•EXPLOITATION BY ÉLITES

•ÉLITE EXPLOITATION AND CITIES

•ÉLITE EXPLOITATION IN EMPIRES

•POWER & PERCEIVED POWERLESSNESS

•SACRED RULE

•LITTLE CHIEFS

•SHAMANS

•THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

•MODERN-DAY DEVIANCE BY ÉLITES

•THE OFFICE AS SHIELD

•INHERITANCE, SUCCESSION TO OFFICE & CORPORATENESS

•BIBLIOGRAPHY

These are unedited notes I am writing to update my work on an upcoming book. They may be of interest, but are not yet polished and are not necessarily tied together in a way that one does in a more organized book. Where you see this configuration: /./ at the beginning of each sub-section heading, ignore it. It is merely a device I use in my word text to move quickly from one section to another.

For the last half of my academic career I have been working on understanding why it is that in the vast majority of human existence, that which preceded the Agricultural Revolution (Ca. 13 thousand YBP [Years Before Present]), there was no political and/or economic exploitation of one group or class by any other. Obviously, something happened in the Agricultural Revolution that changed the nature of humankind’s existence on earth.

To begin our discussion of this subject let me say that I have a book on the subject, as yet only published as a Kindle Book at: http://www.amazon.com/Fabrication-Political-Domination-Paleolithic-ebook/dp/B00158INEG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264880305&sr=1-1

It is entitled: THE FABRICATION OF POLITICAL DOMINATION: FROM THE PALEOLITHIC TO THE PRESENT. Although it is 450 pages long, I have only priced it at $10 so students can access it.

OVERVIEW

Let's ask a seemingly simple question: Is it natural for humans to seek advantage over others? If we look at the rise of poleconomic (that’s my shortened or condensed term for political and economic) domination since the Agricultural Revolution (ca. 13 thousand YBP), we would have to conclude that the answer is “yes.” But what about the long existence of humans before this revolutionary rupture in human existence? If it is “natural” for humans to seek to dominate others, to gain some political and/or economic advantage or leverage over others, why don’t we find the rise of stratified societies before the Agricultural Revolution?

The answer is that we actually do, but such societies are rare. In my book I elaborate on those handful of hunter-gatherer-fisher societies that developed exploitative institutions prior to the Agricultural Revolution and why this happened so rarely prior to the introduction of agriculture and the domestication of animals i.e., herding economies (I will deal with this in some detail later).

So with those few exceptional societies in the long Paleolithic most, 99.9% of all hunter-gatherers were egalitarian. That is, they had not institutionalized means by which one person, group or class of persons could elevate themselves above others so as to exploit them economically or politically. There were no rich people and no chiefs.

[Incidentally, when I speak of the long Paleolithic I am referring to that immense period of time when humans were first emerging to the beginning of the Neolithic Era, when domesticated plants and animals began to figure into human existence in a major way. This was roughly between the rise of stone-working hominids in Africa ca. 6 million YBP to the dawn of the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution ca. 13 thousand YBP (Ristvet 2007: ix, 1)].

So if that is the case, can we say that for some unfathomable reason people were different then – psychologically different? No, men and women sought advantage as individuals. But a woman who gained fame and prestige at making jewelry or a man who became a master hunter only had fame and not fortune and this lifetime-limited esteem could not be structured, institutionalized or fabricated in such a way that a mater hunter, who might be a respected leader, could pass that esteemed position onto his offspring.

During the long Paleolithic people strove to be better dancers, hunters, mothers, artists and so forth. That is natural. Some achieved higher temporary status and others did not, but what did not develop was a system of rules that permitted a leader or respected elder to bundle that esteem in structural position and pass it on to his son or daughter, or to any other person he selected. When he died, someone – through his or her own initiative – might achieve that level of esteem or even surpass it, but she or he would do so through personal effort alone. And a respected leader could have been either a male or female. Sexism and gender discrimination would come later, along with the rise of patriarchal structures in the Agricultural Revolution (and in the few pre-Agricultural Revolution societies that I referred to previously).

So the psychological drive to garner esteem from one’s fellows was there but that could not be translated into a cross-generational set of social and cultural forms that led to a stratified or hierarchal society. Simple hierarchy is where there are levels of esteem but little or no poleconomic exploitation based on them. Stratification, on the other hand, is where it develops that high prestige individuals, groups or classes of persons can and do exploit those with less prestige or power. Neither existed in most cases in the long Paleolithic.

With the domestication of plants and animals that began about 12 thousand years ago life was forever and dramatically changed for the human family. The change I want to focus upon is the effect of the new surplus of food on the ingrained human desire to be esteemed by his or her fellows. In the Neolithic Revolution, which is actually better called the Domestication Revolution, humans for the first time had an impetus to go beyond the simple drive to garner esteem. Now they had reason to seek power over others. What would have been unthinkable and even foolish became desirable. It would have been foolhardy in the hunter-gatherer-fisher cultures of the long Paleolithic to lord it over anyone else. It would have been a recipe for social ostracism or even expulsion from the band. But when there was a surplus of food involved, things changed. At that point seeking political or economic advantage over others became a recipe for success, the ticket allowing one to rise in not only esteem in the eyes of others but in social standing.

What do I mean by this? Social standing involved, for the first time for humans, the appearance of statuses or positions of poleconomic authority to which persons could aspire. Furthermore, once attained – a chieftaincy for example – individuals in power attempted to pass that leverage on to their offspring or followers. Thus, lines or lineages of power were formed i.e., hereditary offices.

We have many ethnographic and historical examples of this, some of which I detail in THE FABRICATION OF DOMINATION from the Paleolithic to the Present. We know that this happened but why did it happen? Why, after such a long period of egalitarianism, did elevated positions come into being?

The answer lies in the possibility, for the first time in human existence, of the development of a food surplus (and later currencies to represent that surplus e.g., coinage). This was wealth, which was no longer a communal pot of gold but wealth that could be accumulated and stored by individuals or families or other groups. Now aggressive individuals could and did go after such wealth and, in time, this wealth could be converted into political leverage over their fellows. Sometimes it worked the other way around i.e., aggrandizers or go-getters sought political office and then used their positions of power to amass great fortunes. All this, of course, still goes on today, but it didn’t go on during the long Paleolithic except on a handful of Paleolithic societies.

And those societies have a lot to tell us about the cause of this great shift in human existence. They hold the key to understanding why, all of a sudden, human beings began to struggle with one another for power positions and wealth. In these few non-agricultural peoples of the Paleolithic – fishers mainly – there was one variable that set them apart for the majority of Paleolithic groups: they were able to amass and store food. In my terminology they could have and strove to achieve a storable surplus of wealth, either as food in the first instance or later one as indicators of wealth e.g., blankets, canoes, big houses, slaves, political offices and so forth.

Woodburn (1982), Testart (1982; 1988) analyzes early food producers as if storage is a key aspect of the labor process influencing the emergence of social forms. Initially, intensive food storage is facilitated by restricted and plentiful food supplies. While it is likely that there is a minimal degree of very temporary storage among most foragers who would be considered non-storers e.g., drying meat after the kill, we don’t see an emphasis on storage until the emergence of sedentary foragers where a significant amount of food is stored for an annual cycle or for other purposes. Such storage is based on seasonal and intensive storage of major food resources. It is this type of storage that begins to alter the egalitarian nature of early societies as aggrandizers begin to fabricate ways of getting their hands on the surplus. Thus, it seems that the adoption of agriculture or herding is less important for social evolution, especially the emergence of stratification and inequality, than the emergence of an economic structure based on food storage and its protection.

So we can say that with regard to food storage in the Paleolithic there were two kinds of peoples: those who stored only as much as they could carry easily from the old camp to the new camp, eating all the rest of their food as needed or as it was obtained; and a second much smaller category of gatherers or sedentary foragers, largely those fishers who had annual runs of fish that could be caught and stored, though there were also peoples like the Yakut-Mono of California who had easy access to acorns and other foods that could be stored in permanent settlements. This is a heuristic distinction for in reality some of the former hunter-gatherers had at least two periods of the year – one in which they moved about with little storage and a second period wherein they settled into a permanent camp e.g., one near a major source of food that could be stored. An example of this is the storage of piñon nuts by the Amerindians of the Southwest. But for the most part foragers used foods that were stored in nature as needed e.g., Mongongo nuts among the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari in Africa. Indeed, nuts represented over 1/3 of their total calories and were available almost all year long. When an ethnographer asked a Ju/’hoansi man why his people didn’t harvest and store these nutritious nuts the man was mystified, replying that they were already stored for the having in nature. Re-storing them would be foolish, unnecessary work.

Drying and storing salmon from the massive runs of the fish in the fall along the American Northwest Coast was not foolish, unnecessary work. It was crucial to the base economy of the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast e.g., Eyak, the Bella Coola, Chinook, Haida, Kwakiutl, Makah, Nez Perce, Nisqualli, Nootka, Quinault, Puyallup, Salish, Snohomish, Takelma and the Umpqua. Whereas for the Ju/’hoansi of Africa it would be idiotic to waste time and energy to store food in their moveable camps; the Northwest Coast Amerindians had permanent settlements along the coastal rivers that brought them a product each autumn (with a lesser run in the spring) that had to be harvested, dried and stored in order to live through the winter. Storage was a main focus of women and slaves, while men spent their time procuring the food. Polygynous chiefs and big men had a bevy of wives and slaves to aid them in the extensive storage processes (Walter 2006). Among the Ju/’hoansi, polygyny was not practiced and a man’s wife was more involved in the procurement of food, as well as food processing. Polygyny among non-storing foragers would not have the recompense it did for the Northwest Coast Amerindians, where Walters (2006:46) notes that polygyny gave wealthy men three advantages: (1) multiple women working in food storage and other tasks provided men with vital aid and improved status; (2) multiple marriage alliances gave such men many advantages e.g., they could call on the protection and labor of more affines than a monogamous man; (3) plural marriage allowed high-ranking men greater ability to organize and compete in potlatches, where storage of large quantities of food would provide an advantage to those seeking to increase their prestige through give-away festivals. Polygyny also enabled big men to better attract additional members, thereby increasing their lineages and productivity (Suttles 1960). In the non -storing Ju/’hoansi, such competition would have been an anathema and there was no need for creating such extensive affinal alliances through polygynous marriage. In non-storing societies, no such complexity is necessary or possible, since wealth is stored in nature and is not accumulated. In the Northwest Coast situation, potlatches and other feasts were critical to validate men’s titles and privileges; whereas among the Ju/’hoansi and other similar non-storing societies, titles and formal privileges did not exist.

Binford (1990) has noted that sedentary foragers establish permanent communities when they become “tethered” to the few access points to aquatic resources. In the Northwest Coast case, these were key positions along the coast and coastal rivers where the Amerindians could easily catch salmon and other marine life, as well as hunt and forage in the lands nearby. In his perspective, such tethering then leads to higher density of population and increased complexity. The Northwest Coast Amerindians came into the lands along the coast about 2 millennia ago (Trosper 2003:1) and given the fact that fish can be dried, they became storers, whereas before they were non-storers. In adapting to the “temporary abundance” produced by large runs of salmon, the Northwest Coast peoples developed certain institutions e.g., the potlatch, property rights, rules of earning and holding titles and reciprocal exchange systems. While seemingly unrelated to economic activities, Trosper claims that such festivals and social institutions were functional consequences of adapting to the Northwest Coast environment. His is essentially a functionalist (and I would say tautological) argument i.e., the Amerindians did what they had to do to survive along the waters of the Northwest Coast. Of course they did or they would not have survived for 2 millennia; but what is more interesting to me is the influence of their storing dried fish on the rise of complexity. Furthermore, how did complex institutions such as title-holding, private property, slavery, polygyny and the potlatch benefit élites and disenfranchise commoners. Institutions, functional in the long-run or not, don’t arrive by magic, but rather through the influence of powerful individuals in society, usually the men I call aggrandizers and which the Northwest Coast Amerindians called titleholders.

Again, Suttles (1960) postulates that in the Northwest Coast ecology, the exchange of resources through the potlatch system provided a way of insuring for a more even distribution of foodstuffs and materials, primarily wood, to accommodate variability in ecological productivity. It may have had that function, but that is not “why” it developed. It was brought into being as those aggrandizers who got their hands of the bulk of the salmon catch had to cope with “temporary abundance” and sought to create ways to increase their prestige, in this case, by publically demonstrating through giving away goods just how wealthy they were.

From a social standpoint, why is this distinction between the non-storing Ju/’hoansi and the storing Northwest Coast Amerindians important? Because stored wealth stimulated a totally different kind of social structure. In most Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies, where only nature stored food, an egalitarian ethos prevailed. Once food was stored in a few Paleolithic peoples, we see the emergence of both hierarchy and stratification, even slavery in some cases.

Storage of food may begin as an over-wintering tactic, along with the building of more substantial housing; but in time, as stores build up, élites may use them as badges of prestige and in the case of the Northwest Coast Amerindians, to compete for such in the institution of the Potlatch.

Testart (1982) has noted that sedentary foragers tend to be located in environments where resources are bountiful during one season and scarce during another. For runs of salmon this was the case, although the Northwest Coast Amerindians had plenty of other marine life to exploit after the salmon runs were over and the fish was dried and stored.

Most anthropologists believe that chiefs, commoners and slaves made up the social classes of the Amerindians along the Northwest Coast. Slaves were traded or captured from other groups and could not the taken from one’s “own people” and were described as non-citizens who originated from other linguistic and political groups. There was variation in the level of control the owner had over the slave, but typically once held as slaves, men and women could be put to work, ransomed, given away as gifts (famously in the potlatch) or even killed. Experts have hypothesized that slaves were both prestige items and means to achieve prestige.

The Northwest Coast Amerindians were maritime people who derived their sustenance primarily from the sea. They knew the sea and its resources and seamanship was a well-known skill-set. The ocean was bountiful and provided salmon, halibut, cod, herring, smelt, octopus, seals and many other forms of sea life. Thus, they were not unlike the other Paleolithic peoples who drew periodically on nature’s larder. Nevertheless, they were one of the few Paleolithic set of societies that had something else to sustain and even bloat their economies – they had massive salmon runs up the coastal rivers. This fact led to a whole set of practices to dry and store the fish. The stored food provided them with such a huge surplus that they were confronted with the same dilemmas that eventually faced agriculturalists in the Neolithic – the need to store and protect the surplus food. This meant perfecting military weapons and developing tactics and strategies of warfare that, if initially were only devised for defensive purposes, eventually led to a raiding of neighboring tribes to secure their wealth and take slaves. Such massive militarism was not part of the daily lives of most Paleolithic foragers, though sporadic raiding occurred from time to time. Marlowe (2004:281) notes that foragers are less virilocal than nonforagers and a correlation of this is that “they have a lower frequency of warfare, probably because they have less stored wealth and less defensible home ranges.”

Of course, technically, the Northwest Coast Amerindians were foragers or non-agriculturalists but they had permanent residences and a homeland that needed defending and great stores of dried fish that required more military buildup than one finds among most Paleolithic foragers. Why a permanent residence? Because the sea and the rivers flowing into them formed idea foraging locals and were prized places to settle. Land adjacent to good access points was valuable and owned by family groups, mostly clans.

So we see that a storable surplus is an important cause of societal complexity. Some pre-farming peoples worked out a very different strategy of survival than wandering foraging and/or hunting. They managed to devise more intensive hunting-and-gathering patterns that allowed them “to establish semi-permanent and even permanent settlements and support larger and more complex forms of social organization” (Adas et. al. 1992). Among the most stunning of the Paleolithic settlements are those of Central Russia. It seems that there was an abundance of large but slow woolly mammoths in the region ca. 20 thousand YBP. Local hunting techniques produced meat supply that, when supplemented by gathered wild plant foods, made it possible for them to live in the same locale throughout much of the year.

Here we have an example of a Paleolithic hunting-gathering society, not a maritime community that had permanent settlements and a more complex civilization. The causal variable is the same in both situations: a localized, constant supply of food. This prevented both the inhabitants of the Central Russian steppes and the peoples of the Northwest Coast to establish and maintain a sedentary lifestyle and to institutionalize customs and social structures that were of far greater complexity than the majority of Paleolithic peoples.

Stratification and having a storable surplus of food seem to be strongly correlated. The Central Russian settlements of the mammoth hunters were not egalitarian, as was the norm in the Paleolithic. Also stratified were societies of the Natufian complex, which extended over much of present-day Jordan, Israel and Lebanon. Climatic changes occurred between 14,000 and 13,000 YBP that enabled wild barley and wheat plants to spread over much of this Middle Eastern area. Apparently, these changes created a cornucopia of nuts, grains and the meat of gazelles and other game. This diet provided a foundation for numerous and quite densely populated permanent settlements.

Between about 12,500 and 10,000 YBP, the Natufian culture flourished there. The Natufian survival methods did not involve the development of new tools or means for production. Rather, it was founded largely on the intensification of gathering wild grains and improving storage methods. They were not farmers but rather were sedentary foragers.

The population at Natufian settlement sites reached as high as six to seven times that of other early farming communities even though they merely foraged in a lush environment. The surplus is what was important, not the method to produce it.
Archaeology reveals that the Natufians developed quite sophisticated techniques of storing grain and devised pestles and grinding slabs to prepare grains and nuts to eat.

And with surplus, as we have seen for the Northwest Coast Amerindians, we encounter hierarchy in the social structure. The evidence archeologists have uncovered regarding housing layout, burial sites, jewelry and other material data indicate that Natufian society was stratified. Clothing appears to have been used to distinguish a person's rank and there were majestic burial ceremonies that marked the passing of community chieftains. It also seems that family descent and inheritance were traced through the female line, again distinguishing them from egalitarian people of the Paleolithic Era who had no set rules concerning the inheritance of property.

Hobbes has been proven wrong by anthropologists in that only about 6% of the world’s people live in a constant state of warfare (Otterbein 1968).

/./POLECONOMICS

Instead of using the terms political and economic separately I compbine them into poleconomic. This is to emphasize that in real life the political affect the economic and vice versa. That is, academics when studying either economic factors or political ones should understand that they interact in the real world i.e., understanding econ factors is seriously disadvantaged when their political component is ignored and vice versa. Claessen & van de Velde (1985; 1987) call this the Complex Interaction Model.


/./AGENCY

Agency has become a topic of anthropological interest (Archer 1988) and sociological theorizing (Fine 1992). The focus of much of this investigation has been synchronic i.e., how agency function in the modern-day social world. My theory is diachronic i.e., it is about how agency was used at the beginning of the Neolithic by aggrandizers to create rules and rule sets (institutions) that gave them an edge on securing control over stored food, and later other forms of wealth and also advantages in harnessing the labor power of the bulk of the members of their groups.

Agency was exercised for private ends in the sense of an
“effective, intentional, unconstrained and reflexive action by individual or collective actors” (Dietz & Burns 1992:187). Agency did not begin with the development of a surplus, it just got redirected by a few scheming individuals who wanted more power, prestige and property for themselves. I am claiming that such use of agency was a powerful causal factor in the emergence of complexity and continues to be a driving force behind modern-day capitalist accumulation.

Agency can be used for social good or personal aggrandizement. I am well aware that conservative politicians and thinkers and most capitalists believe that seeking self interest in economic affairs benefits society. My viewpoint, on the other hand, is that, be that as it may e.g., the masses may have more material goods by virtue of the capitalist system, certain well-connected, powerful and economically-advantaged individuals disproportionately benefit by virtue of their exercise of agency in high office and positions of power in the corporate world. They can and do manipulate the rules and structures of power for personal and class benefit. The Marxist literature is full of theory and data on this. I am less interested in showing how the system works in the modern-day (though that is my minor interest) than showing how agency has contributed to the evolution of sociocultural ideas and institutions over time.

/./WHAT IS THE FABRICATION OF DOMINATION?

I contend that aggrandizers began to build or fabricate institutions of political and economic power once a surplus was generated. This happened first in sedentary foragers on the late Paleolithic but really became widespread with the domestication of plants and animals. It is important to understand the process of domination creation because it existed in every level of institutional construction from the villages of sedentary foragers to empires and it continues today in nation states and perhaps the nascent world order. At every level, go-getters or aggrandizers strive to control information, power positions and people in order to have privileged access to power, prestige and property.

Early aggrandizers in Neolithic times no doubt began their political careers by organizing farm work. They set about to create the social mechanisms by which surplus labor could be appropriated. Remember, in the Paleolithic, among non-sedentary foragers, there were no formal social mechanisms by which the surplus value of labor was appropriated. Joining a hunting party or a foraging group was voluntary, though surely if an individual shirked his duty to procure food and continued to eat what was brought back to camp, he or she would be criticized and if it continued, perhaps ostracized. Nevertheless, compared to the Neolithic, one’s labor was not under the direct control of any formal position, such as a chief, nor was it organized institutionally. By contrast, once there was a surplus to go after, nascent leaders schemed to create social rules by which labor could be controlled. They wished to be the organizers and allocators of labor. Briefly, then, among sedentary foragers and later, and more widely, among farmers and herders of the Neolithic, labor was systematized through social mechanisms, according to institutional means under the control of officers e.g., headmen, chiefs, etc.

Brumfiel & Earle (1987:2) note that the ability of political overlords to organize a more effective economy is to be seen as a potent raison d’être of powerful leaders. In my terminology they were taking a poleconomic approach to forming a world where they could rule. Clever entrepreneurial types in early farming societies no doubt tried to attach their political schemes to something important e.g., linkages with food production, fertility and the occult world. Later, as long-distance trade took hold, overlords would take control of it. All this would have been done under the guise of improving the welfare of the people, and in many cases, as with capitalism today, it probably did improve conditions, but at the same time early politicos were able to disproportionately benefit, as modern-day capitalists do, from the organization of the economy. The overwhelming evidence from history is that élites benefited from such organization whether or not the masses did and sometimes it was an economic zero sum game, with élites almost always coming out the winners.

Today it is good to be a CEO or other high executive who can set, more or less, his or her own salary or benefits package, as it was good to be a king in ancient times. Of course, as I am writing this in 2010 in the USA there are corporate executives with million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes, while my neighbors struggle to hold on to their houses and jobs.

Both historical and ethnographic data clearly show that in spite of ideal concepts of noblesse oblige politicos and nobles rarely helped their people in times of stress (Cohen 1999) and Barth (2009 [1857]); showed that among the Bornu of the Western Sudan during famine the élites actually held grain back to drive up the price and then profited by selling it to desperate commoners. Controlling the economy, to the extent that that is possible, is a good thing and unduly benefited élites in the past, as it does today e.g., when modern-day financial experts are singularly able to comprehend complex financial instruments and manipulate them to their advantage at the expense of others in the marketplace. Claessen & van de Velde (1991:5) write, “There is no reason to suppose that the benefit of the commoners ever was the sole impulse for a government to undertake large and costly activities.” But it seems reasonable that they would have portrayed their efforts as having social benefit and economic prosperity as a goal. You don’t become king by letting people know you are only out for yourself. Interests and tactics of maneuvering politicians are best kept secret and they take herculean measures to do so, witness the actions of the Neocons in the second Bush administration or the revelations brought out by publication of the Pentagon Papers. Transparency is a four-letter word to most politicians and surely early aggrandizers sensed this.

Why is it important to study the evolution of inequality? There are probably many reasons but I will give my perspective on it. My theory has to do with the fact that élites create institution of poleconomic power, manipulate those which they have not invented and do so in order to advance their own private agendas. Sometimes these coincide with the social good and often not. This has been true since the emergence of a surplus and its concomitant social complex, roughly at the beginning of the Neolithic Era. It continues to be true today and therein we see the importance of this study. Modern-day politicos are making decisions that do not lead to the survival of the human species and perhaps all life on earth; or to put it another way, they are not making the decisions that can curtail the growing forces that could end life on earth, principally global warming, but also nuclear warfare and, in general, the growth of resource-consuming ways of manufacturing industrial goods. In his perceptive article, Roscoe (1993:1) comments:

Few subjects are more deserving of social scientists attention than political evolution and the emergence of the state. In the space of less than 10,000 years, the merest fraction of human history, social systems have changed from small-scale, kin-based, egalitarian communities to vast, complex states characterised by global influence, complex jural codification, and a pronounced centralisation of power. No development has had greater moment for the human condition: it has introduced the possibility of unparalleled material well-being, while facilitating exploitation on a hitherto unimaginable scale and bringing life on earth to the brink of extinction. In view of these capacities, it is perhaps not overstating the case to claim that the future of humanity may rest on how well we come to understand the processes behind these developments.

Political chicanery and inactivity on the major issues facing Humankind can bring humanity to its knees if not into the grave. This is serious business, since we have lots of information to help create transparency in political dealings and, if democracy is to work and if governments are to develop a world body of cooperative institutions to deal with issues of a global scale, then we must have transparent dealings so that vested interests do not inhibit the measures needed to be taken to solve global problems.

/./THE STIFLING OF INDIVIDUALISM THROUGH DOMINATION

When aggrandizers began to take control of society by creating rules and institutions that favored certain lines of succession to authoritative roles, such as chief or shaman, a certain amount of individualism or more appropriately individual initiative was stifled. For instance, intergenerational mobility is high in non-storing foraging societies (Lenski 1984:110). That is, there is little in the way of rules to prevent the gifted son of a dull father from becoming the accepted leader of the band. Likewise, the dim-witted son of a talented hunter will not be considered to lead the hunting parties just because he is the son of the man who performed as “the best hunter in the band” for so many years. Talent and initiative were rewarded by the very lack of institutionalized roles and rule-sets among non-storaging foragers. Leadership was open to anyone and everyone. There were no fixed lines of succession or officialdom to prevent the cream from rising to the top.

There are also many ethnographic accounts of female leadership in societies that had not come under the influence of patriarchy However, Dahlberg (1980) notes that there is considerable variation in egalitarian societies vis-à-vis female status. Several contributors to TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF WOMEN make the point that women in foraging societies were not dominated by men (Reiter 1975). My point is that with the rise of patriarchy women’s status took a qualitative turn downwards. The culturally constructed privatization of female labor was a critical step in the fabrication of patriarchy and domination.

In the tribe of patriarchal farmers I studied in Africa it would have been unheard of for a woman to become chief, though she could become a respected woman in the domestic domain, not the political-jural domain, to use Meyer Fortes terminology. Because of a strong patriarchal ethos and patrilineal lines of authority, no woman would be allowed to lead the clan as the earth priest. In fact, at rites presided over by this official, all women involved in some way will stand off from the ritual performance as observers, but certainly not participants. Such an ethos of patriarchy developed as men fabricated rules to enable them to control resources, a process that largely took place in the transition from foraging to economies that focused on farming or herding.

Contrast this to many ethnographic examples of foraging societies where women were not held back because of their gender or participation in the domestic domain. Certainly, the sexual division of labor existed in foraging societies e.g., because of the strictures of pregnancy and lactation most women would not become hunters, though one could if she excelled at hunting. A quick-witted woman was more likely to be considered the best at finding food during women’s foraging outings or she might be considered the best all-around mother and homemaker, just as men would not be considered for such labeling. What is more, women tended to make greater parental investment in children than men (Pinker 2003:252). Nevertheless, in hunting and gathering societies it was not impossible for women to excel at men’s tasks.

For example, early reports told of a Crow Amerindian woman who never married a man and became an outstanding warrior and chief. Not having assumed womanly responsibilities in adulthood she was able to compete with men and her natural talents were revealed. In fact, after a distinguished career as a warrior and a rise to the chiefship, this crow woman married four wives who performed the required female tasks for her, according to the normal Crow division of labor. She fulfilled the role of a man in every way admirably (Denig 1961:195-200).

So anatomy is not destiny, but this outstanding Crow woman was an exception and the biological fact of pregnancy, lactation and the rigors of childrearing were a factor in the formation of the sexual division of labor in early societies. The facts of biology were only a base cause of the perception by humans that males and females are different and it did lead to a division of labor in foraging societies but not to pervasive discrimination. Biology did lead men into big game hunting and, with only an odd exception in the ethnographic record (see: Estioko-Griffin, Agnes & P. Bion Griffin 1981), relegated women to foraging, small game hunting and domestic chores. Men were repeatedly selected to hunt big game because of their height, weight and strength advantages over women. Furthermore, women are handicapped during pregnancy and lactation with regard to hunting large animals (Harris 1993:57-58). It is important to realize that this was not relegating women to an inferior position. Their individualism and initiative was not inhibited by men, as it would be later in the few storaging hunting and gathering societies and even more so in Neolithic farming and herding societies. They could more easily hunt small game and gather tubers, berries, fruits and nuts from nature and this was not inferior work, since it brought in the most calories to the group and was much more a staple of their diet than meat from an occasional kill of a large animal. Looked at another way, women were in “the” most important economic role in society in addition to being responsible for the reproduction of the group through childbirth and child rearing. If anything, male hunting would have been a marginal activity, albeit one that brought in highly valued protein in the form of animal meat. Additionally, women in foraging societies perform many tasks that are crucial to the process of getting food from nature to mouth, as well as building huts and other vital tasks that would take them away from long-distance hunts.

In hunting and gathering societies this division of labor was not divided into good and bad work. Women’s work was as respected as big game hunting. Halperin (1980:379) makes the point that food procurement, hunting and gathering, were not the entire set of tasks in the division of labor in hunting and gathering societies. There was also: the movement of the camp from one ecological zone to another; the manufacture of clothing, hut building, food processing, securing firewood and water and other food-processing materials. These activities, many done by women, were just as essential, if not more so, than big game hunting, which did not bring in the majority of food consumed. In doing these important tasks, women’s work harmonized with that of men and women were not looked down upon, but looked over at, so to speak. Eleanor Leacock (1954:116) noted that in her fieldwork among the Montagnais-Naskapi foragers of Labrador she was able to observe women and men interacting there and wrote, “they were able to give me insight into a level of respect and consideration for the individuality of others, regardless of sex, that I had never before experienced.”

Again, Marjorie Shostak (2000) provides us with another look at gender relations in a foraging society, the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. There, parents show no preference for one sex over another in their children. Both parents equally guide their offspring. Both parents participate in selecting mates for their children and the newly married couple will as likely live near their matri-kin as their patri-kin. Women, as major food providers have the right to dispose of the forage they bring back to camp. Women and men live lives largely free of domination by the opposite sex and women are both nurturing and assertive, as the situation dictates (200:246).

Clearly, men and women were more equal in such societies than in our modern industrialized societies, although not entirely so, with men having a slight, but significant, advantage in politco-jural matters (Harris 1993:59). Yet, Colin Turnbull (1961; 1983) found Mbuti women to be individuals capable of holding their own with their men, who did not see themselves as superior to their women. He notes that an Mbuti hunter could not hunt without his wife performing valuable non-hunting or hunting-related skills. Turnbull wrote that an Mbuti man knew that women produced the bulk of his food and that her non-hunting roles were extremely valued.

So we can say that biology provided a base for hominids to develop a division of labor, yet not a discriminatory one; but later in storaging societies the fabrication of an ethos of patriarchy and rules to limit poleconomic roles to men (gender hierarchy) occurred and had a more restrictive influence of women’s activities. Gender hierarchy had a more widespread and restraining influence on women than simple biology and such a culture of male superiority only developed as an institutionalized format after men began to compete with one another for control of the surplus and, consequently, for control of people’s labor. This was patently clear in my fieldwork among the polygynous Sisala of Northern Ghana, where women were “doubly valued” according to my male informants. That is, wives were seen as having two important functions that furthered a man’s economic and political security in his role as headman of the lineage or a segment of it: (1) they could perform work for men; and, (2) they could bear children for them. Children were highly valued by men because they increased the size of his following, so to speak; and they were also workers in the domestic sphere of the lineage and on the farms. Boys remained in the patrilineage for life, working for their father more or less until the death of the father. Girl children, on the other hand, worked as child laborers performing many important tasks for men until they married exogamously to take up such chores for their husband and his lineage. The economic return on girls went beyond their childhood labor, however, because in marrying off their daughters they receive in return for the loss of her individual labor rights to the labor of her husband and the men of his lineage (Mendonsa 1977). There were, for male heads of families, also political considerations influencing their decisions with regard to their daughters in that by marrying them off, not only did they access new forms of labor, but gained political allies in her affinal clan.

Such poleconomic considerations emerged once a surplus of food generated both the need to control labor and the emergence of warfare and the need for political alliances. Early aggrandizers would have seen the necessity of controlling both men and women and, as one of my Sisala informants put it, “women are doubly valuable.” These considerations sculptured the future of socialization of children and gave rise to structures that channeled girls into roles limited to the domestic sphere and boys to performing tasks set by the institutions of patriarchy.

Such rigid roles limited individual imitative and funneled human energy into activities that benefited men in general, and specifically those in charge. The bright child, male or female, could more easily be overlooked or prevented from being all he or she could be. On the other hand, history is replete with examples of effete sons frittering away their lives in idle pleasures in the shadow of dominating and successful fathers.

/./GOVERNMENT BY PERSUASION

Using the word “government” is a misnomer, but my point is that power is wielded in all societies, even in hunting and gathering bands. Nevertheless, power in such non-storers is ephemeral, limited, non-tenured and extremely tenuous. This temporary leadership is based on earned prestige a woman or man achieves in life. It is nominal leadership, not an inherited office. Honor and respect are necessary prerequisites to the exercise of political influence in non-storaging bands. The leader has much more responsibility than privileges. All she or he receives in return for service is more prestige, that which earned the individual a leadership role in the first place. Personal qualities allow a person to become a leader, not being born into a line of succession. As Holmberg (1950:59) notes for the Siriono, there is “no obligation to obey” a leader and “no punishment for nonfulfillment.”

It is common in such societies for the leader’s advise to be ignored if it is thought inappropriate or if his past performance has not been reasonable. For example, with no tenure or authority the headman in the storaging Northern Maidu Amerindians of California “held his place only so long as he gave satisfaction” (Dixon 1948:223). The functions of a Maidu leader were “largely advisory” and it took a man of extraordinary powers to get people to follow him (1948:224). A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1948 [1922]:47) found much the same thing for Andaman leaders.

The Maidu occupied the high Sierras of Northern California, the foothills and the valley plain north of the Interior Miwok (see map below). This was the drainage of the Feather and American Rivers and included the modern-day counties of Eldorado, Placer, Nevada, Yuba, Butte, Plumas and the southern half of Lassen (Heizer & Elasser 1981:15).



In addition to little chiefs and shamans, the Sacramento Valley Maidu has a secret society to which teenage boys were initiated (Dixon 1905:323). Important men, such as little chiefs and shamans, came from the members of the secret society. A shaman was the leader of the secret society. Members wore distinctive headgear and carried a special staff. The shaman is also a dance instructor to the initiates, who must learn specific dances taught only to members of the secret society. As society head, the shaman also acted in a judicial role, settling disputes and because people considered him to have supernatural powers, he was greatly feared (1905:328). He was the keeper of a sacred and powerful set of objects or “lȱ,’mimūsemtsī.” As guardian of these powerful sacred objects, the shaman was a powerful leader and could send curses to the group’s enemies and, as the group members feared, could use those malevolent powers on them.

Sometimes the secret society leader was not the shaman and would be initiated by the shaman. Thus, unlike non-storing foragers, there were three important politco-judicial roles in Maidu society: the little chief, the shaman and, sometimes, the head of the secret society.

Shamans were highly competitive men, aggrandizers in the true sense. The struggled to achieve their status and had to work hard to keep it, or advance within the ranks of community shamans. For example, the Northern Maidu held an annual dance to which all shamans were invited. In this festival each shaman attempted to outdo the others in dance, assisted by his knowledge of magic. The competitive dance continued until only one shaman was left standing and he was proclaimed the foremost spiritualist in the territory. His status was immensely elevated, while those he out-danced suffered a diminution of prestige (Dixon 1948:283-284). Clearly the competition was a means of attaining great prestige and power in Maidu society. In other words, as is found in many complex societies, shamanism was an effective means to gaining political power. As the aphorism goes, “It’s Good to be King” but perhaps even better to be a leader who is feared because he is thought to have murderous magical powers.

/./COMPLEMENTARY DOMAINS IN THE EARLY DIVISION OF LABOR

Hunting and gathering as methods of procuring a livelihood is the oldest and most widely distributed system in time and space. Ancient hominids were hunters and gatherers from about 2.5million YBP, when stone tools first appear in the archaeological record. Accordingly, humans were hunters and gatherers for by far the largest fraction of human evolutionary history. Fully modern humans evolved between about 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, but the toolkit of Late Pleistocene peoples suggests a somewhat different lifestyle than ethnographers have recorded among contemporary hunters and gatherers. Late Pleistocene peoples (50,000-10,000 YBP) had a relatively larger emphasis on big game hunting. In the Holocene, as big game became harder to find, hunting and gathering societies began to rely more on small game, fish, shellfish and plants. At that time, women’s work in processing foods must have gained even more importance as they had to deal with a diet less reliant on big game. The division of labor was already established, with men hunting big game and women doing most of the foraging and now increased processing of small game and vegetable matter, but men would have found it more difficult to find and kill large animals. Consequently, animal protein became highly valued, so that while men brought in fewer calories than women, they were able to supply, from time to time, large quantities of highly appreciated meat.

The recent rise of feminist anthropology and, in general, the writings of feminists on the subject of the early or Paleolithic division of labor in foraging societies (e.g., Mies 1986) has done a disservice to truth. While some writings have helped us understand the division of labor of early foragers (e.g., Gerder 1986), others (e.g., Mies 1986) distort reality with ideology. While Mies has many important things to say about patriarchy and men’s domination of women through the ages, she warps the division of labor in foraging societies to make it appear that women’s work was more important than that of men. She writes (1986:58):

Women’s productivity is the precondition of all other human productivity, not only in the sense that they are always the producers of new men and women, but also in the sense that the first social division of labor, that between female gatherers (later also cultivators) and predominantly male hunters, could take place only on the basis of a developed female productivity. … the survival of mankind has been due much more to “woman-the-gatherer” than to “man-the-hunter”… [since] women provide up to 80 per cent of the daily food, whereas men contribute only a small portion by hunting.

She quotes Lee and de Vore’s MAN THE HUNTER (1968) to substantiate the percentage differences in foraging vs. hunting, data taken from the Ju/’hoansi of Africa. These data are correct, but also misleading, as is her overall excessive efforts to make it appear that women were more important in the early division of labor. But let's take her first comment of female superiority first i.e., that women “are always the producers of new men and women.” If I remember my high school biology correctly, it takes both male sperm and a female egg to produce a living zygote, which develops into a fetus and then is born as a human baby. That is, biologically men and women have complementary roles in the production of new human beings. One cannot do it without the other.

This complementarity carries over into the division of labor. Man the hunter certainly derives the majority of his caloric intake from the foraging efforts, but if all women in a band suddenly died, the men would know how to live off of Nature, as they often do while seeking game in the bush. The other way round would be true, except that women would have a harder time killing big game, though small game and forage would keep them alive without men. In the real world of hunting and gathering societies both sexes work together to produce their livelihood and woman-the-gatherer and man-the-hunter separation is a logical solution to dealing with the different kinds of caloric storage in Nature. That is, some is stored in small game, plants, fruits, nuts and berries; while other, and different kinds of, calories are stored in big game. Because of their less robust bodies and the natural restrictions of childbirth and the need to breast feed babies, men took to hunting and women to foraging and small game hunting. It was, and is for many living hunting and gathering societies today, a workable solution. For example, among the Tiwi (Goodale 1971; Goodale et. al. 1987) women, with less stature than men, were able to hunt small game such as birds, bats, fish and turtles while men’s hunting of big game “required considerable skill and strength” (Goodale 1971:169). In those Australian bands, women were able to bring in more calories than men because small game animals are more accessible to kill than large game and they also forage for vegetable matter.

Mies (1986:59) is also wrong in saying that men could not go on hunting expeditions without the calories brought in by women. For daily life in general in camp it works better with women foraging and men hunting, but men and children also forage in most hunting and gathering societies and men, while on long-distance hunts, forage for themselves. In fact, for these societies anciently and also today, most individuals who have become at least teens have the requisite knowledge to both hunt and forage. While men can and do forage, women are deterred from big game hunting by their biology and by cultural concepts deriving from the innate differences between men and women that deem big game hunting to be a male enterprise.

When non-scientists with an axe to grind try to write about Paleolithic hunter-gatherers we enter the realm of fantasy. Feminists want us to accept what Stange (1997: 30) calls the gathering hypothesis. She writes:

If the products of gathering accounted for as much as 80 percent of the prehistoric human diet, and if women and children account for roughly 75 percent of the total human population, and if foraging preceded hunting in the evolutionary history of hominids, then it was only logical to assume that those key adaptations that marked the beginnings of humanity were to be sought in the women’s work of gathering, rather than in men’s hunting.

Notice the assumption in this paragraph that men didn’t gather in the hominid dawn. This is not only not logical, but the ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers shows clearly that men, who are the big game hunters in 99.9 percent of all hunting and gathering societies we have studied, also forage. What do hunters do when returning from an unsuccessful hunt when they don’t have to carry meat back to camp? They bring back whatever food they can forage along the way. They also forage for food while hunting to fuel themselves in the hunt. If they are gone for an extended period of time on a long-distance hunt, they forage to support themselves. It is a little more than irksome to an anthropologist to read such tripe spewed out by those with an ideology they must adhere to, facts be damned.

Mary Stange, however, is not like many other feminists who seem to be overly concerned with the “mental skills that might have developed out of gathering” and the priority of women’s work in the evolution of our species. This, in spite of the fact that ethnographic and archaeological data point to the complementarity of gender work in hunter-gathering societies. She notes, correctly, that “women frequently engage in the active pursuit of mobile small game” and questions the validity of making hunting and gathering gender opposites (1997:35).

While ethnographically men do gather and women do hunt small game, let's not be dissuaded from the fact that emically their activities are seen as occupying two distinct realms. Those of us who have lived with people in less complex societies know, and the ethnographic literature overwhelmingly shows, that in these simpler preindustrial societies women largely work with and interact with other women; while men largely work with and interact with other men. They spend much of their time with those of their own gender.

Why is this important for my theory of the fabrication of domination? Because while gender roles were complementary in the Paleolithic in their male realm men, as the principle users of weaponry, were the prime operators in dealing with external threats and their realm was an embryonic politico-jural domain (Fortes 1969). In non-storing hunter-gatherers this domain was relatively dormant and benign with regard to domination of others within society, but once there developed a storable, stealable surplus, politics and militarism became vitally important for the group. The complementarity of the domestic and politico-jural domains still existed, but now men had control of political offices that allowed office-holding men to dominate other less-powerful men and women. No matriarchies have ever been found ethnographically and even in matrilineal societies that trace descent in the female line, inheritance and succession to high office pass from man to man through that line. Furthermore, matrilineal societies only constitute 9 percent of the ethnographic record (Schneider & Gough 1961:708). In other words, men still legally control key offices and material goods in all societies studied by ethnographers. This is not surprising in that when a surplus developed, it was men who began to formulate the rules regarding the disposal of property and key offices both intra-generationally and between generations. This has nothing to do with mentality or any of the other feminist concerns in making comparisons between men and women. It simply naturally followed from the long history of twin domains – that of men activities being separated from those of women, that which is called the division of labor by social scientists.

/./HORTICULTURE & THE NEOLITHIC DIVISION OF LABOR

We have seen in the cases of storing hunter-gatherer-fishers – the Northwest Coast Amerindians, the Chumash, the Yakut-Mono and the Calusa – that a surplus of food produced hierarchy and a division of labor greater than existed in most Paleolithic non-storing hunter-gatherers. But that complexity could not spread around the world as did farming. With the first Neolithic horticultural societies came the emergence of a combination between farming and storing, a compound set of relationships that was the germ of an explosion of complexity that diffused rapidly around the globe. This is generally known as the Agricultural Revolution.

But true agriculture – farming with the plow – came after the simpler form of farming – horticulture, wherein farmers used a simple digging stick or hand-held hoe to till the earth. The main technology, the seeds or tuber sprouts, was common to both horticulture and agriculture, with only a variation in tool use. What growing plants did to society was revolutionary. It provided a storable, stealable surplus that exploded and expanded the social structure in world-shattering ways.

Let's look first at leisure and the division of labor. Most hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than most Neolithic farmers, but the difference came in who was working and who had more leisure time. With horticulture the majority of the farmers worked longer hours than did their predecessors in Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies, but rather than leisure being more or less evenly distributed, at least within genders; in the Neolithic special individuals worked less, while most farmers worked more. Those few at leisure were not, however, idle. They used their newfound leisure time to create new institutions of power.

Another way of saying this is that the Neolithic division of labor became more complex than that which existed in most Paleolithic bands. Those with time on their hands began to fabricate political institutions, ceremonial activities, defensive architecture and also ways in which they could disproportionately benefit from the increased labor of most in these new farming societies.

This happened in conjunction with another ground-breaking event – sedentarism, which in the Paleolithic we only encountered in a very few hunter-gatherer-fisher societies. In the new Neolithic societies people became tied to specific pieces of land, albeit in a rotating fashion in slash-and-burn farming and more permanently in later farming societies that had developed techniques of crop rotation and manuering that allowed them to farm the same plot of land indefinitely.

The point is that land ownership emerged and that enabled people to stay put and accumulate more material possessions. It also meant that they had to protect against attacks of those have-nots or those who wanted more. In Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies there was little to protect beyond a few personal possessions. With farming one had to protect one’s land and its stored produce, neither of which could be moved in any significant way. In other words, sedentarism led to the rise of property ownership, communal at first, but there were men with time on their hands that were scheming to find ways of developing private property and means to gain more of it than others.

Another way of saying this is that once there was a storable surplus aggrandizers went to work to create acceptable means of gaining control over people’s labor and the products of that labor. The division of labor was not a benign invention, nor did it happen automatically i.e., without human agents consciously manufacturing it. That is not to say that all that manufacturing was anti-social or selfish in the sense that the agents were trying to gain advantage at other people’s expense, though some aggrandizers certainly were. The farmer who saw advantage in mining the ore on his land that politicos needed for their newly invented metal weapons was simply making a rational economic decision, but decisions, no matter how benign the intent can have cumulatively disastrous consequences for society, to wit: the various societies that have gone out of existence because their farming practices degraded their environment.

However, I am especially interested in how vested interests developed once an economic surplus was available for conscious agents to seek. One theoretical points of great interest to me is the assumption that inherent in all social formations lies power and the potential for aggrandizers to manipulate the social rules for personal advantage. This was prevented for most of the Paleolithic in most places because of the lack of complex social formations and the absence of a storable, stealable surplus. Aggrandizers in non-storaging foraging societies could have interests e.g., they may have wanted to become a respected shaman or the best singer in the group, but they could not develop vested interests. By their very nature, vested interests are “vested” in social formations. Furthermore, they can endure through the generations and can be passed on through rules of inheritance and succession to office.

Another way of thinking about vested interests in relation to the difference between the Neolithic and the Paleolithic is that a non-storer usually only had interest in activities and minor objects, not the means of production or its storable products. Crano (1995) calls this ego involvement with a particular attitude object. In this theoretical orientation psychologists postulate that an individual’s interest in a given attitude object has the potential to impact attitude-behavior consistency. In other words, an attitude object that directly brings about positive personal consequences for the one with an interest is more likely to produce consistent behavior toward that object.

If we think about this in the Paleolithic context, there were few objects in band life and all could be manufactured from nature by all members of society. If a boy had an interest in his father’s bow, he could watch others making them and fashion one for himself. If a girl wanted to become a shaman like her mother, she could glean the necessary information to make an attempt at becoming involved in shamanism.

This open access to information changed once complex social rules began to develop in society, which rules began to set boundaries on knowledge, defining who could access information and who could not. The emergence of secret societies is a classic example.

William Crano (1995) indicates that an individual is stimulated to take an interest in an object or objects if he sees a positive outcome of having such objects, or if he derives some boost to his self-image. Early aggrandizers would have derived both from elevating themselves to high position that enabled them to control the surplus and people’s labor. An important point in Crano’s theory of vested interests is that an individual can hold different, even conflicting, interests. Thus, an office-holder may hold altruistic values and have an interest in doing his best for society, but at the same time hold personal interests that conflict with such high-mindedness. Since, by definition, an aggrandizer is ego-centric in office he is likely to manipulate the rules to advance himself. Sometimes this private advancement is consistent with the good of society, but sometimes it is not.

In the early years of the Neolithic Revolution, as aggrandizers built rule-sets and institutions in the political domain, patterns were established that permitted office-holders a great deal of power, always defined as necessary authority, and they were able to establish themselves as arbiters of the social good, while at the same time enriching themselves, their families and their close associates.

The early decades of the Neolithic Revolution presented members of these nascent farming communities with many new situations that had to be worked out and this was fertile territory for the aggrandizers of that time. They were able to manage society’s affairs while claiming to hold the general good over private interests, but in time personal vested interests crept into the emerging institutions that laid the foundation for an unjust and unequal distribution of power and wealth.

In the Neolithic Revolution, concomitant with the expansion of the output of farms was the proliferation of social roles. There was a marked increase in specialized political, economic and religious roles in these early societies. The early opportunities for aggrandizement and exploitation of the general public came not only to a chief, but also to the chiefly staff and other significant office-holders e.g., the head of a secret society or a war chief. These embryonic élites often worked in concert to elevate themselves and those they favored over the general population, both economically and politically.

Other privileged individuals and families were emerging as well. While archaeologists know that there was some Paleolithic trade, it was very limited compared to the explosion in the exchange of goods between communities that took place in Neolithic times. Some areas had special and widely desirable products – timber, ore, gems or could grow crops that were desired in other areas, so traders emerged to fill this economic niche.

Furthermore, economic specialists were beginning to generate manufactured products that traders could carry to faraway towns. Some of these traders became wealthy and some converted that wealth into political currency, either by seeking high office or by buying influence with incumbent office-holders. Together with other emerging élites, the wealthy traders acted to construct a new social world, one that had never before existed, except in a few storing Paleolithic societies. As Gerhard Lenski (1984:126) noted, “many simple horticultural societies exhibit a degree of inequality unmatched in any hunting and gathering society.”

If the privileged were inventing rules to advantage themselves, what were some of these rules? One of the commonest seen in modern-day ethnographic examples is that a chief secures authoritative rights to the labor or crops produced by farmers under his domination. For example, the Manasí Indians of South America provide us with a view into the past. The Manasí chief had a staff of subordinates to enforce his commands. He lived in a larger house than commoners and had two large fields tilled by his subjects for his benefit. And by rule, he also received the first fruits of the crops produced by the villagers, plus anyone catching fish or killing game had to give the chief a portion, again by rules fabricated by such office-holders (Métraux 1942:128-131). Chiefly power and privilege of this sort is not commonly found in hunting and gathering societies.

Lenski (1984:128ff) notes several kinds of inequality found in simple horticultural societies:

(1) That based on office-holding
(2) That derived from wealth
(3) That obtain by having secret religious or magical knowledge
(4) That based on military prowess
(5) That based on the practice of slavery
(6) That based on oratorical skills

These categories are not always discrete in real life, for office-holders can be wealthy and military men can take slaves, among other possible combinations. In our analysis of the Yakut-Mono chiefs and shamans we have seen ethnographically what must have occurred thousands of times in those few affluent hunter-gatherer societies and the farming communities of the Neolithic – close association between the chief holding political authority and the shaman who had special occult knowledge or powers. In my own study of an African farming community, the Sisala of Northern Ghana, I gathered historical and ethnographic data on the first chief appointed by the British in the first decade of the 20th century. He held his new chiefship at the behest of the British colonial authorities but tried to bolster this by claiming to have supernatural powers as well. As the anthropologist Robert Lowie has put it, the functioning of a chief “is definitely enhanced when he combines religious with secular functions” (quoted in Lenski 1984:129).

The ethnographic record established by anthropologists in a little more than a century is replete with such examples of an overlap between secular and occult power. Paleo-archeologists have found indicators of shamanism and it exists in such hunter-gatherer societies today as the Ju/’hoansi of Africa, but in those societies there is no chiefly officers that can attach themselves to the shaman and his or her function in such societies was, and remains, curative and meditative. However, once there was a surplus to pursue the marriage between secular power and the hidden powers of shamans was a logical union.

Another pathway to political power and recognition was the exercise of military prowess. Surplus food and storage of it stimulated warfare in the first farming communities and men, who in hunter-gathering societies were hunters, now could use their skills in combat. The warrior role was institutionalized and mythologized as such aggressive men showed success in defending their community or taking booty from others. Returning heroes were celebrated ceremoniously and soldiers sometimes were organized in warrior societies. Among the Hasinai Amerindians, for instance, any male had the opportunity to win the honorific title of amayxoya or “great man” by performing with distinction in battle (Sterling 1938:170). With the advent of large quantities of stored food and a world of haves and have-nots, war became a way of life.

As warfare became institutionalized, slavery came to the human scene. It had only been practiced in the few Paleolithic storaging societies before the Neolithic. Once land was a productive factor in life, one where more labor could produce more wealth, the rise of warfare led to periodic capture of slaves that could be put to work on the land. Women captives were especially valued in that they were easier to capture and keep in captivity and they could do both domestic work, function as wives or concubines and produce additional workers for their captors. As Gerhard Lenski, writing of horticultural societies, notes: “women are the one really crucial form of capital goods in this type of society” (1984:135).

In this new world of surplus food, valuable land, sedentarism and warfare, leaders who stepped to the fore and led their people were aggrandizers who principally had two outstanding traits: they were good fighters and/or orators. Among the Iroquois, according to George Peter Murdock, “oratory and arms” were the twin paths to fame and distinction (1934:305). Eloquence mattered and also men who were able to lead men into battle and where they could receive honor and booty became natural leaders back home.

This was a revolutionary time, when in horticultural societies aggrandizers were quick to seize the opportunities for power, prestige and property afforded them by the rather meager economic surpluses. They were the fashioners of inequality, the architects of hierarchy and stratification. They sought to create the concept of “office of the leader” or chief. Such men possessed the qualities of leadership and aggressively sought after control of people, land and its output. In so doing, they institutionalized inequality by creating leadership positions, attached to which were new and special privileges, giving leaders greater access to power, prestige and property.

The bursting on the human stage of political offices was a monumental occurrence. Its importance cannot be overstated. The arrival of authoritative offices and titles complicated the relationship between personal qualities and status. Leadership no longer rested solely on personal attributes, but a man (in most cases) could attain a position of authority by heredity or appointment by an authoritative figure. At this point in history, many statuses had been formalized to the point where they had a title or official “label of entitlement.” Office-holding became the complex function of both the personal qualities of an individual and his title or office. As Professor Lenski put it, “Now it becomes possible for an individual to enjoy a reward to which his personal attributes alone would not entitle him” (1984:131).

This would not have been possible in non-storing hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic, where leadership was firmly planted solely on a person’s attributes. A man who directed the hunt could not be one who lacked the knowledge and skill needed to find game and kill them. He could not be one who, merely by virtue of being the son of a great hunter, would step forward to lead a hunting party. Equally, a woman who was a gifted healer could only attain this status by virtue of her personal qualities and her curative success, not because she was the daughter of a great shaman.

So in the Neolithic Revolution we see the institutionalization of leadership roles, along with the concept that such leaders would have privileged access to power, prestige and property. Such access no longer rested exclusively on personal characteristics, but could be achieved by succession to office, usually based on birth. At this critical juncture in history, a leader was no longer a man or woman having the right temperament to lead, but rather could be someone whose father or mother died and vacated the spot.

The Hasinai Amerindians provide a good example of how this worked. When a Hasinai chief died before his son was mature enough to hold the office of his father, the son was acknowledged as the chief, but other leaders formed a council and ruled on his behalf until he came of age and then they stepped aside (Swanton 1941:171). This young man acceded to office by an accident of birth, rather than by demonstrating any ability to lead. In this case, and many others since the dawn of animal and plant domestication, the vital functions of society’s leaders became institutionalized. In such cases, offices are transmitted from generation to generation as if they were property. When men (and sometimes women) could ascend to authoritative office, with all its attendant privileges, inequality also became a fixed feature of human existence. Clearly, power, prestige and property came to be linked to certain families which, based on heredity, supplied society with its leaders.

This contrast between a leader’s personal characteristics and his office is a very important one for our discussion of the fabrication of domination. Once sterling qualities did not carry an individual into a position of leadership, as it did in the non-storaging bands of the Paleolithic, then he would carry with him into office those personal attributes that he was endowed with, good or bad.

If officers had less than eminent traits then two things could happen: (1) they could behave badly in office. That was the least significant aspect of automatic accession to office. (2) The far more momentous facet of succession to high office was the fact that office-holders could create rules and institutionalize features of office that benefited them, their families and their followers at the expense of the general public.

Again, there are two important aspects to this capacity of office-holders to generate inequality: (1) As I have already said, they could fabricate new norms pertaining to their capacity to rule; but they could also (2) delete or alter existing rules and institutions, once more to their benefit and to the detriment of society at large. A simple example of this is the ruler who, based on vainglory and egotism alone, sends his soldiers into battle to gain fame for himself. If the ruler was in power due to sterling personal characteristics this would be less likely to occur. Again, if the office of the leader was not hereditary, he could more easily be removed. Hereditary succession to office functioned to make leadership more permanent, both for the individual in power, but also through time. Each new installation of a chief, for example, would make chiefship a more solid fixture of society in the minds of its members. When members of a single family repeatedly took office, it would make the general public look upon such succession to office as normal.

Is this routinization of leadership a problem and, if so, what are the negative consequences? The trouble with an institutionalized system of leadership is that, if a line of succession becomes established in a given family or cohort of élites, they can come to see their office-holding as a right, as well as the perks that go alone with it. Such entrenchment of the powerful is difficult for others to dislodge.

Another problem is that linear succession to high office creates a gap between performance and reward. It is easy for a “royal family” to focus more on what rewards them than what is good for society. In the formative years of the Neolithic, and in some non-industrialized peoples today, society seems to have recognized these problems and taken steps to prevent the abuse of office. Sickly or highly incompetent office-holders may be deposed from time to time, as among the Jivaro Amerindians (Sterling 1938:40-41). Or sometimes other powerful men in society simply ignore the rules of automatic succession e.g., among the Iroquois Amerindians, only members of a certain extended family could because sachems (paramount chiefs), but the choice of a given candidate was left to family members and if they deemed a family member who was in line to become a sachem incompetent they could substitute another of their choice (Murdock 1934:306). In my fieldwork in Northern Ghana I found that sometimes a village chief was incompetent, but allowed to stay in office and a local big man (nihiang) would function as chief, simply ignoring the incumbent or using him as a figurehead. If anthropologists have learned anything in the century or so our discipline has been involved in empirical research it is that the ideal model of society is almost never achieved statistically. For instance, Marie Reay (1959:116) has shown for the Kuma of New Guinea that not all the men who achieved power were from the wealthy group of polygynously married men that were ideal candidates for leadership. In other words, as in the case with most simple horticultural societies, there is a degree of social mobility and aggrandizers not in line to rule may seize power in a variety of ways.

Nevertheless, history shows that there have been many cases where royal families acted for long periods of time in anti-social ways in spite of such measures and revolutionaries in the broader social frame. Yet it was simpler in early farming societies for lineal succession to be broken. Later, as those in authority gained great military might, revolutionaries would find it more and more difficult to “throw the bums out.”

In the simple horticultural societies of the early Neolithic the degree of inequality was not much greater than in hunter-gathering societies, and, initially, it may have been less than we have seen in the storing hunter-gatherer-fisher of the Northwest Coast, the Chumash and the Calusa of Florida. But it was the beginning, the foundation of later and more pronounced inequity, that which would come when surpluses and wealth from warfare and trade raised the possibilities for go-getting men. Since production in the early years after the discovery of how to tame animals and grow crops on permanent plots of land was limited, so was the total value of goods. In short, there was little to lust after in the way of material wealth, but in those things that aggrandizers go after, power, prestige and property, the absence of property leaves the other two: power and prestige.

It is important to understand that while aggressive men in these early horticultural societies did not have much in the way of material wealth to capture, they did go after power and prestige. In many, prestige could be had by being a good giver of goods, not a hoarder. It could come by being a good protector of the community’s little stores of food. Men who provided society with these benefits were the early leaders, the chiefs and their chiefly staffs, which may have included shamans, war-chiefs, leaders of secret societies, family headmen and other aggressive men. In the process of seeking prestige through distribution of goods and the protection of the community’s wealth and wellbeing, such leaders were also laying the cornerstones of officialdom, the idea that leadership was not simply based on personal qualities, but rather was vested in positions of authority.

Once there was sufficient wealth to seek and defend, aggrandizers began to seek high office and since such positions brought those perks that these assertive men sought, over time, they sought after security in office. That is they wanted to be fixed firmly in office themselves and to find ways to perpetuate that security of power either in their own family or their chosen associates. Offices became like property, something to be passed on from generation to generation because they were valuable commodities that brought office-holders desirable rewards.

Evolution is not unilinear. Archaeologists tell us that there were many different sociocultural forms in early horticultural societies, as there is in the ethnographic record. How aggrandizers sought power, prestige and property varied, but inequality was on the rise in all. If we look for one key variable in this rise I would say it is heritability. When there developed inheritance of key resources and power office inequality rose. For example, in her study of the Kuma of New Guinea, Marie Reay found that their system of private property and polygyny operated to keep boys in poor sub-clans poor; while at the same time keeping those in prosperous sub-clans rich (1959). I saw this in my own research among the horticultural Sisala of Northern Ghana, where those lineages with wealth tended to be polygynous, had larger fields, more farmhands, could send chosen sons and daughters to school as a form of breaking into jobs in the modern sector and tended to have their people in political power. The most powerful lineage in the area was the Kanton family, which held the office of paramount chief, several headmasters, many members in key government positions and even one man on the board of governors of Ghana Airways. No other family came close with regard to wealth and power. Once colonialism brought chiefship to the region and this family cornered the opportunities it produced, it began to grow larger and wealthier, in part by clever positioning but also by using offices to enhance its own power, prestige and property. Some of this was also due to illegal and unethical behavior on the part of the paramount chief of Tumu. As a British-appointed administrator, Chief Kanton had judicial power over others in his domain and built up a polygynous household that contained, at the time of my fieldwork in the 1970s, about 60 wives, some of whom had been taken from other men with less power, men who had been brought before the chief on judicial matters. Through maneuvering in and manipulation of high office the chief was extremely wealthy, being the only man at that time with a big American car and large tracts of farmland, partly farmed by villagers and even men from other clans who had been “requisitioned” by the colonial chief to work his private farms. Once this large foundation of wealth was in place, the chief was able to find his people key jobs in the regional political and economic framework, one of them became a successful businessman in a faraway city and eventually was called back home to take the chiefship at the death of his uncle. High office has its rewards. The fact that the paramount chiefship stays within the Kanton family has served to stabilize patterns of inequality in Sisalaland and to make it easier for those who enjoy power, privilege and prestige to retain them and pass them on to their offspring. Authority and tyranny can sometimes be bedfellows.

This authoritative structure, chiefship, came to the Kanton family “out of the blue,” so to speak; but in early horticultural societies at the Neolithic dawn aggrandizers had to formulate political offices. Strong, hereditary officers were not found in non-storing hunter-gathering societies. At this dawn they became a political fixture that remains with us today.

Chiefs began to live in better houses, dress in distinctive clothing, eat better, demanded deference from others in public and had associated with them certain taboos e.g., commoners could not talk directly with the chief, but rather had to do so through a specially-appointed linguist. Some chiefs, once in office, could not be seen to eat, let alone carry out the bodily functions of normal people. If the society practiced polygyny, the chief would have more wives than anyone else. Of course, the chief would be exempt from manual labor and had more material possessions than commoners, which archaeologists see in royal burials, the grave goods being indicative of greater material possessions of the chief in life. No one chief had all these perks, but, on the whole, chiefs moved to the top of their societal hierarchies.

In this elevation, this moving up the ladder, so to speak – “one finds the first traces of real tyranny in these societies” (Lenski 1984:139). Probably most chiefs were diligent servants of the people, but a few began to act as if they were masters of their people. Ian Hogbin reports that one village chief committed adultery frequently and continually demanded pigs from his people and was obsessed with practicing sorcery against his opponents (1951:144-145). In these simple horticultural societies we often see a nascent version of the aphorism “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Such domination in simple horticultural societies is not common and not often tolerated when an abusive chief gets in power. There are many reported cases of such chiefs being killed, but viewed in evolutionary terms, as the rules of office grew, inequality was built in, brick by brick. Early chiefs could not get away with many shenanigans because of two factors: (1) these were face-to-face societies where it was different to hide one’s crimes and (2) there was a democracy of weapons. These early politicos were not locked away in a great palace, with a bevy of courtiers to stand between him and the people. The early horticultural chief had to be careful in a world where his subjects had access to him and the weaponry to kill him.

/./KINGSHIP AND THE RISE IN INEQUALITY

On the foundation of inequality laid in the horticultural societies at the beginning of the Neolithic grew political structures greater than simple chieftaincies. The names of the highest leader in the social pyramid vary from place to place. They were called kings, queens, emperors or empresses and were distinguished from simple chiefs by holding more authority, power, military might and wealth.

The shift from small chieftaincies to larger kingships and empires had an effect on the public’s ability to control the behavior of office-holders. Professor Simon in his book, élite deviance indicates that the greater the size of the organization the greater the likelihood of élite deviance within (2002:38). Kings and emperors had much bigger courts with teams of deputies and courtiers to handle the public, not to mention larger police forces and military. Many had also successfully created an image of infallibility and untouchability by creating a linkage between themselves and the sacred. The people found is more and more difficult to access a leader on high who claimed to be a divine king (Feeley-Harnick 1985; Brisch 2008). As the ability of the people to reach their leaders in kingdoms and empires the power of leaders and the possibility of tyranny increased. Another way of saying this is that with the fabrication of domination and greater complexity emerged better means of leaders fabricating more domination and complexity. With simple chiefdoms there were fewer layers of complexity between the people and their leaders. With the emergence of kings and emperors layer upon layer of complexity and opacity were added. The first chief that withdrew behind a silken curtain to rule in opaque remoteness started a process of elevating leadership to unreachable heights.

Roughly, the appearance of monarchs greater than simple chiefs took place about 6 thousand YBP in the Middle East. These emergent kingdoms and empires were built on the greater surpluses produced by irrigated agriculture or metallurgy or terracing or the technology of the plow or a combination of these factors. Military conquest was also responsible for territorial expansion and the spread of kingly suzerainty.

Kings and their people achieved greater surpluses and had more leisure time to invest in building pyramids, temples, colonnades, palaces, ball courts, plazas, courtyards, dance platforms and causeways. Because their world was one of great inequality, with have-not societies and very wealthy ones, almost all wealthy communities were fortified with structures like encircling city walls and moats that took great effort, wealth and organization to construct. Irrigation canals, where they were used, also required an organizing body to construct, regulate and repair these carriers of water (Wittfogel 1955, 1957).

According to Wittfogel centralized states formed to organize society around problems facing them, largely those dealing with the movement and control of water in farming communities. This brought positive consequences for society, but as Simon (2002:271) point out, “One important structural condition that perpetuates élite deviance is the massive centralization of power in the hands of the élite themselves. Such centralization tends to guarantee the conformity of underling[s]…”. As kings emerged as very powerful chiefs their cadres increased and their underlings were able to access privileged lifestyles that set them above the general population and this gave the king power over them because to continue the high living the non-royal courtiers and palace functionaries had to follow the dictates of the king, whether their policies were good or bad for society, they could be useful to the courtiers and royal representatives. In the modern context Simon (2002:271) notes that non-compliance by such followers “may result in severe sanctions for potential dissidents, including being fired, court-martialed, blacklisted, demoted, or not promoted. Still other sanctions might included transfer to a less desirable assignment or geographic location or forced into early retirement.” In ancient kingdoms, recalcitrant underlings could lose their heads.

To continue to carry out the king’s wishes meant personal rewards and avoidance of negative sanctions, life-threatening or otherwise. But personal advancement or security was not the only motivating factor in subordinates’ compliance with royal directives. Over time, such leaders built up an aura of legitimacy so that their commands were seen as lawful, coming as they did from the supreme leader who was often as not linked with Deity in the minds of the people.

Furthermore, a subculture of élitism developed around the king. A small group of power holders developed precepts and customs that could be conventional or deviant, but almost always serving élite interests and occasionally those of the general populace. When élite interests clashed with those of the public, élitism almost always won the day. Such self-serving behavior was possible because élites in power tend to develop a sanitizing ideological prism through which they view the world (Box 1983:54-57). This is a subcultural set of ideas that allow them to pursue their own interests, even at the expense of the public good. It is common for élites to develop special vocabularies of motive allowing them to pursue their own ideas and interests while rationalizing that they are doing the right thing. This can involve objectives, both deviant and non-deviant. According to Sykes & Matza (1957) élites engaged in deviant behavior construct an elaborate vocabulary designed to provide both motive and neutralization of guilt. We have contemporary evidence of this from the Nazi Era in Germany where party functionaries dealing with the mass murder of Jews referred to such efforts with terms such as “special treatment” and “clearing up fundamental problems” (Arendt 1964). These vocabularies almost always contain a number of guilt-reducing rationalizations.

Élite actors within this subculture of rule at the top of society operated in two sorts of activities: (1) onstage and (2) offstage. Onstage activities were those up front, those actions and words available to the general public. The conversations and behaviors of the courtiers and the king that occurred backstage were secret and contained the possibility of both altruistic consequences for society and personalistic advancement for the officers of the court. Whichever the case, they were privy to the courtiers and the king and not to any scrutiny or control by members of society. It was in this backstage arena that began the structure-building that gradually produced a pyramidal social structure that gave those at the top great privileges and an inside track to great power, prestige and property.

The message from the king’s front stage spokesmen indicated to the public that all their actions were legitimate and in the interest of society; while backstage they were involved in building institutions that were designed to, in the very first instance, preserve what power, prestige and property they already had and in the second instance structures that would enhance their privileged access to the very best society could offer.

What was communicated to the public had to be what we now call “spin,” which is a euphemism for lies because much of kingship was itself built on lies. Perhaps “The Divine Right of Kings” is a prime example. Just as men with swords stole land and enslaved small farmers throughout the Middle Ages and then fabricated documentation to justify their theft (Mendonsa 2008b), kings and their followers built counterfeit edifices of power, often based on the proposition that Deity had chosen them to lead.

One well-known example of this was the concept in ancient China of The Mandate of Heaven, a philosophical invention of early thinkers concerning the legitimacy of rulers (Mote 1999). As with The Divine Right of Kings in the West (Burgess 1992), it sought to codify rule based on divine approval. While the Chinese philosophy was based on divinity smiling only on a just ruler, the Divine Right of Kings in the West was more authoritarian (Homan 2009).

The Divine Right of Kings granted unconditional legitimacy and, under this fabricated concept, revolution was never condoned since the European kings to whom it was applied ruled in covenant with God and the people.

Such fabrications were evident in monumental architecture and art commissioned by kings. For example, Louis XIV of France commissioned approximately 300 portraits of himself, one of which below, Louis XVI as the sun (see below). This was clearly intended to artistically communicate the connection between kingship and the heavens.



The Divine Right of Kings was both a political and religious doctrine of royal absolutism. It asserted that a reigning monarch was subject to no earthly authority, even the people over whom he ruled and he alone derived his right to rule directly from the will of God. Not only was the king not subject to the will of the people, but the aristocracy and the Church, the two main estates besides kingship in Medieval Europe, had no legitimate right to question the king’s decisions.

The assumption behind this doctrine perpetrated on the people by the state was that if the king was to act unjustly, God would intervene. If God did not do so, for example by killing the king, then his actions and decrees were, ipso facto, just ones. The king could do no wrong because God could do no wrong. The doctrine implied that any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers would be contrary to the will of God and would constitute heresy.

This idea of The Divine Right of Kings was incorporated into ordination ceremonies. The king or queen was to be crowned in the traditional Christian ceremonial, for example, see below Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649), being crowned by a hand from a cloud.



Not all fabrication to gain power was limited to the state. In Medieval Europe the other great power was the Papacy and many popes ruled as any medieval prince did, with armies and fabricated authority. It was Pope Gelasius I (r. 492-496) that used the metaphor of The Two Swords in an attempt to mitigate the conflict between church and state and unify Christian society in Europe. It proclaimed that the twin governments of sacerdotium and regnun, each with its own God-given powers, were merely the spiritual and the temporal arms of a single Christian republic.

While we know the authors of such concept in medieval life, they were based on countless previous fabrications by early pre-Christian kings who linked their reigns to Deity in myth, ceremony and the construction of great monuments, temples and palaces to set themselves apart from the common man. Thus, we can say that political rule from its beginnings in the early Neolithic and up through the rise of kings and emperors was built on fabrications and falsehoods.

/./ROYAL DEVIANCE

In spite of all the structures royals created in fabricating kingship through the ages sometimes they were caught crossing the line. This was sometimes due to a contradiction in the theory of divine kingship. It goes like this: If the king is closely associated with God, then the king must be responsible for the good and bad that happens to his people. While modern humans have controlled many diseases, the ancients were at the mercy of plagues, epidemics and pandemics. There were also droughts and crop failures. These periodic disasters put the king in a bad light.

K. C. Hanson (1996:11) notes that such purported royal deviance appears in what Biblical scholars refer to as the “Royal Deviance Narratives.” These passages in the Bible indicate a pattern in which there is a breach by the king of his sacred responsibilities, which incurs punishment by Deity in the form of plague, famine or drought. Parallel narratives are found in ancient Greek literature e.g., The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod's The Works and Days, Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes and in the three plays by Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.

Hanson remarks that the connection between the different Royal Deviance Narratives is due to the shared cultural assumptions and social structures of the Israelite, Hittite, and Greek societies in the Levant, which were organized as aristocratic monarchies and they were all advanced agrarian societies in terms of technology. In addition, their foundational values were honor and shame and they were all societies in which sacrifice and war played integral roles.

Roughly the plot of the Royal Deviance Narratives goes like this: the king offends Deity, who brings some form of natural disaster on the king’s subjects. Since the disaster needs some explanation divinatory experts take up the task or a prophet appears on the scene to try to make sense of the catastrophe. They contact Deity and receive messages that indicate malfeasance on the part of the monarch. Divination or prophesy usually indicates the need for a blood sacrifice, sometimes an animal but at other times the blood is to come from the king himself e.g., the gouging out of Oedipus’s eyes. Once the sacrifice has been completed, Deity is appeased and institutes an abatement of the catastrophe.

Cultural analysis of the Royal Deviance Narratives by Hanson reveals that, following Mary Douglas (1966) it is commonly royal breaching of the sacred order, the king’s impurity that results in disaster befalling his people. Royal impurity brings danger to their world.

Douglas (1966: 104) maps three sources of power with regard to purity: (1) formal powers wielded by persons representing the formal structure and exercised on behalf of society; (2) formless powers wielded by interstitial persons; (3) powers not wielded by any person, but inhering in the structure, which strike against any infraction of the structure’s rules.

Hanson picks up on the third point with regard to the Royal Deviance Narratives.
In them, all of these kings have violated sacred structures—no other human is wielding power against them e.g., an enemy's curse or a shaman’s spell. For example, the Philistine leaders placed Yahweh's ark in the temple of Dagon. Saul breached the Israelite covenant with the Gibeonites. David in some fashion mishandled the census. Suppiluliumas breached the Hittites' covenant with the Egyptians and discontinued sacrifices to the Mala River. Agamemnon refused to return the daughter of Apollo's priest. Again, Oedipus committed regicide/parricide and incest with his mother.

These are all serious breaches of the sacred that make the king into a malefactor. Following Malina (1986:26) we can perceive a deviant as a person “out of place,” whether defined as sinner, criminal or an unclean person. If the social structure is of God through the king, then any breech of rules is an offense again the sacrosanct order of things. Order equals purity in this logic and deviance is impure.

But it is not individual impurity. In the ethos of communitarianism that existed in these ancient societies, retribution was often not thought to be individualistic but was meted out on the group e.g., in an eye-for-an-eye world any person in a murder’s kin group might be killed to retaliate for the murder. God bringing plague to a people as punishment for the sins of the king was a logical scenario given the communal ethos. In ancient Mediterranean cultures individuals were brought up to be embedded in the group. In documents from that era individuals are almost always oriented to some larger grouping:clan, guild, village, ethnic group or region. As Geertz (1983:59) notes in this regard:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

In this logic, if a group benefits from the actions of leaders, then they must also suffer when those actions go against the rules of sacral purity.

In my study of divination (Mendonsa 1982; 2003) I found that diviners in the agrarian Sisala culture look for personal causation i.e., they do not ask only what caused a malady, but go on to ask a second question: who caused the cause of the malady? In my ethnographic film, Sisala Divination: The mystic tradition (Mendonsa 2000), I detail the case of a woman who was injured when her roof collapsed, also killing one of her children and injuring another. The diviner knew that the falling roof killed and maimed, but the question was: who caused the roof to collapse at the very time they were sleeping below?

The same logic appears in the Royal Deviance Narratives. Great disasters cannot “just” happen, they must be caused by human error and since the king is responsible for all things in society, he is defined as the culprit. Divine wrath permeates the thinking of ancient societies and when kings arose to lead them, they became the foci of societal wrath. Defeat in battle by their enemies would be interpreted as due to “God’s wrath,” but again the second question would arise, “who caused God to be angry at us?” In a kingship, the answer likely would be “the king.”

It was also a question of honor and shame in the ancient Mediterranean world (Gilmore 1987). In life, the honor or the individual is not the only issue. Deviant acts by a person reflected on their group, as when a wife was found to have committed adultery her husband would be shamed, but also his entire kin group. The same logic was extended to kings. Their deviance could and did, in the reasoning of their culture, bring tragedy and misfortune to their people.

In the hierarchical world that was formed after the Agricultural Revolution, the king became more than an individual; he was a representative figure responsible to Deity for the whole people and the land.

Kingdoms often arose from redistributive chiefdoms, where the chief was responsible for the material welfare of the people and used this as justification for amassing great stores of food that were, in theory, to be redistributed to the people in times of need. This concept carried over into kingdoms, but it was a double-edged sword. The king was responsible for success or failure in warfare and also for good harvests and bad. Any disaster could not happen without royal involvement.

This was the justification of royal hegemony – the royal head was very powerful and carried great statue but also great responsibility. Psalm 72 of the International Version of the Bible shows these connections:

Endow the king with your justice, O God,
the royal son with your righteousness.
He will judge your people in righteousness, your afflicted ones with justice.
The mountains will bring prosperity to the people, the hills the fruit of righteousness.
He will defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; he will crush the oppressor.
He will endure as long as the sun, as long as the moon, through all generations.
He will be like rain falling on a mown field, like showers watering the earth.
In his days the righteous will flourish; prosperity will abound till the moon is no more.
He will rule from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth.
The desert tribes will bow before him and his enemies will lick the dust.
The kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him; the kings of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts.
All kings will bow down to him and all nations will serve him.
For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help.
He will take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from death.
He will rescue them from oppression and violence, for precious is their blood in his sight.
Long may he live! May gold from Sheba be given him. May people ever pray for him
and bless him all day long.
Let grain abound throughout the land; on the tops of the hills may it sway. Let its fruit flourish like Lebanon;let it thrive like the grass of the field.
May his name endure forever; may it continue as long as the sun. All nations will be blessed through him, and they will call him blessed.
Praise be to the Lord God, the God of Israel, who alone does marvelous deeds.
Praise be to his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen and Amen.
This concludes the prayers of David son of Jesse.

Exemplifying the point that God is behind the earthly social structure is also part of a speech from the chorus in OEDIPUS TYRANNUS (Lloyd-Jones 1994:863-872):

May such a destiny abide with me that I win praise for a reverent purity in all words and deeds sanctioned by laws that stand high, generated in lofty heaven, the laws whose only father is Olympus! The mortal nature of men did not beget them, neither shall they ever be lulled to sleep by forgetfulness. Great in these laws is the god, nor does he ever grow old.

Such myths and stories in these early agrarian societies were designed to indicate the eternal nature of the fabricated social structures. That kings and their retainers were doing the structural fabrication was hidden behind the mythical assumption that the political order came from God. However, when kings constructed the ideology of divine rule, they could not have foreseen the inherent flaw in it – that it contained a contradiction between royal responsibility for both good and bad times in the land.
/./IS EGALITARIANISM NATURAL?

Gerhard Lenski, an otherwise excellent theoretician, drops the ball in his look at inequality when he writes: “The fact of inequality is almost surely as old as the human species” (1966:3). In actual fact, in its institutionalized form it is a relatively new phenomenon in human life, starting only a few thousand years ago after our species developed the capacity to produce a surplus, rather than rely on the natural food pantry of Nature to supply their daily needs. If we take the accepted figure of 6 million YBP as the beginning of the emergence of our species from the hominid line and 13 thousand YBP as the commencement of the Neolithic Era, then humans have only had structural inequality for less than 2.2 percent of their existence.

Boehm (2001) also focuses on whether humans are naturally hierarchical or egalitarian. He posits that egalitarianism does not result from the mere absence of hierarchy, but rather he says that egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy. This brand of hierarchy is common among hunter-gatherers and is a curious type that is based on an anti-hierarchical set of values or ethos. Put another way, human evolution has selected for societies that stress egalitarian behavior and those societies that were adaptive in the long Paleolithic were those that could keep the natural tendency toward aggressive behavior in check. This "reverse dominance hierarchy," as Boehm somewhat awkwardly calls it, depends on the rank and file banding together to purposely dominate aggrandizers who see themselves as potential masters. This must be done, according to Boehm, if they wish to remain equal. Those at the top of this “Paleolithic hierarchy” are in fact those who resist any form of personal aggrandizement and certainly would have resisted the implementation of structural inequality. Of course, this “hierarchy” was an inverted pyramid in that the majority of band members would have been egalitarians who would band together against aggrandizers who wanted to act in ways contrary to the group ethos of egalitarian. In other words, the processes of group selection can account for the evolution of altruistic behavior in humans and the fact that stratification as it emerged in the Agricultural Revolution was held in check for so long.

We can ask: why was there a need to have and enforce an ethos of equality? Again, was Paleolithic society in non-forager bands completely egalitarian? The answer to the last question is “no.” This is why there was a need to institute and put in force a community effort to deal with those who, naturally and by virtue of their personalities, would broach the communitarian rules so cherished by the majority.

I would agree with Marvin Harris in postulating that all humans have a generalized innate tendency to seek prestige (1989). Malinowski (see Kuper 1996:24-25) was one of the first anthropologists to show from his Trobriand data that people there, in what was then called a savage society, only cooperated and acted in an altruistic fashion when they could not avoid doing so. Cooperation was not an end in itself. People cooperated only as a form of enlightened self-interest. They were not naturally cooperative, being, by nature, self-seeking individuals. If a native could, Malinowski indicated, avoid his obligations without a loss of prestige, or without the likelihood of some debit or damage, he would do so. He was one of the first anthropologists to punch a hole in the myth of the “native as a robotic follower of custom.”

I too, in my fieldwork in Ghana found that the villagers did not nearly comply with the customs and rules they would so easily portray an absolutes. Deviance was as common as conformance, if not more so. The Sisala villagers had egalitarian values and less than egalitarian behavior, which to my mind meant that, like people in Europe or the USA, they were self-interested and skirted the customs whenever they thought they could get away with it. As I showed in THE POLITICS OF DIVINATION (1982), divination was a means to redressing such deviance and the harm it was portrayed through soothsaying as having caused. Divination and post-divinatory sacrifice were major cultural instruments by which the deviant actions of individuals were constrained, if not perfectly and usually after the deviant actions had already taken place. Redress was symbolic in most cases rather than substantive (see my article “Political economy in a goatskin bag: Attempted symbolic power creation in Sisala divination,” 2003).

What does this mean for my theory of domination fabrication? In non-storing, egalitarian hunter-gatherers self-aggrandizing desire is thwarted or kept in check by a concerted effort to enforce the generalized ethos of egalitarianism and aggrandizers had to be content to seek social approval by achievements that were limited to their lifetime and which functioned as social goods e.g., being a good hunter, mother or entertainer (e.g., a storyteller, mimic, comic or dancer). Since there was no surplus to garner the focus of aggrandizers, they simply sought what prestige they could achieve within the context of the group ethos.

Was there deviance in Paleolithic non-storing hunter-gatherers? Yes, but there were more or less immediate sanctions to bring the deviant to the dock of justice. Usually this was criticism and gossip, but in rare cases it could be violent retaliation by the group on the individual deviant, as in the case of a murderer who was himself killed by the band’s hunters and the, in a powerful symbolic act, each woman and child shot an arrow into the dead body. The message was clear: egalitarian values rule and deviance from it brings swift social justice.

This all changes when a surplus becomes a possibility e.g., in the case of the hunter-gatherers who happened into the Northwest Coast ecosystem, which could provide them with runs of fish that could be dried and stored as an over-wintering devise. Those families that happened to settle on very good access points to the rivers were automatically advantaged and such families became wealthy and powerful as a result, permitting aggrandizers within such families to become status climbers e.g., chiefs and those who became key figures in the potlatch competitions. In time, then the initial aggrandizement of seekers was turned into an ethos of competition and hierarchical values.

In other words, altruism is natural only if there are no opportunities for the ten or so percent of society to turn opportunities into elevated status, wealth and political power. When the material environment changes and permits self-aggrandizement it emerges in the form of status and wealth seekers taking advantage of new opportunities.

We have come to see that hierarchy and stratification are absent in small-scale societies that are technologically rudimentary, and incapable of producing economic surpluses (Lenski, 1966). Hierarchies and systems of stratification are minimally developed in all but a few hunter-gatherer societies because there was no real wealth that could be contested and thus no basis for the formation of classes. Once there was an ecology that produced a surplus of food that could be accumulated, those hunter-gatherer-fisher societies developed stratification, large-scale militarism and even slavery. With a surplus aggrandizers could then compel others to work for them and create wealth.

This contrasts greatly with people who live only or primarily by hunting and gathering, where intensive cooperation and sharing seem to derive from a sensible strategy of variance reduction (Wiessner, 1982; Cashdan, 1985; Winterhalder, 1986a, 1986b). That is, among hominids and early human hunter-gatherers experience taught them that there would be times of plenty and times of scarcity i.e., resource variance. Storing food in sedentary foraging societies reduces this variance but in most hunter-gatherers sharing is a way of banking your plenty and calling on that account when you face scarcity. You share the bush cow you killed today and eat off the antelope killed by your fellows tomorrow.

Sanderson (nd: 41) reasons that “this may be the reason why egalitarianism is so strongly policed in most hunter-gatherer societies: it is in everyone’s long-run self-interest.” However, when societies increase in size and scale, become more technologically sophisticated, and become capable of amassing large economic surpluses, conflict and competition begin to supplant cooperation at the level of the wider society because then there are resources for which individuals consider it useful to compete.

It should be clear to the discriminating reader that my theory of inequality is not a functionalist position. Davis concisely defines that approach as: “Social inequality is thus an unconsciously evolved device by which societies insure that the most important positions are conscientiously filled by the most qualified persons” (Davis 1949:367). In other words, stratification is the result of a natural condition, evolving not out of the wants and needs of individuals, but out of the needs of society. This, of course, is a reification of society, since “society” cannot “need” anything, but it sure appeals to conservative thinkers and those persons who find themselves in very high positions in society. That was the appeal of “social Darwinism,” those misguided interpretations of the great thinker that misconstrued the concept of natural selection. To functionalist thinkers, society, seen as a social organism, has needs and individuals are selected to best fulfill those needs, hence the “need” for a stratified society. To Durkheim and his concept of organic solidarity, society was to be seen as an organic whole, with its constituent parts functioning to maintain the others; analogous to how the parts of an organism’s body also serve to maintain each other and the organism as a whole (Durkheim 1933).

It must be said that Durkheim also recognized the need for historical analysis, which is, in a modern rendition, a view that individuals make choices that act to construct the social fabric. In other words, stratification is not “natural” or “needed” by society, but rather it is a socially constructed framework and one that disproportionately advantages certain individuals and classes. My approach, then, is more in line with conflict theory (Bartos 2002). To conflict theorists like C. Wright Mills, power is not always exercised for the social good, but rather its application leads to vested interests. These interests are lodge in specific privileged groups and classes (Mills 1956).

This view sees human actors making decisions that create conflict in social life and, cumulatively, result in material rewards unduly going to some and not to others. Inequality does not derive from nature, since humans lived for eons of time without it, but rather emanates from decisions made about the appropriation of labor and its rewards by powerful men.

The Andaman Islanders provide a good case for presuming that the Paleolithic was a time of egalitarian practices in that it was a relatively uncontaminated foraging society when A. R. Radcliffe-Brown studied them in the early years of the 20th century (1948 [1922]:43ff). Living in a natural abundance, the Andamaners shared food and land was a free good. Portable property was private, but freely shared for the asking. Their custom of giving presents was a further leveling mechanism; plus, a giver would expect to receive a counter-gift at a later date and derived prestige by giving. This is a form of institutionalized redistribution. C. Daryll Forde noted that in such egalitarian societies a person stands to gain more by giving than by hoarding. The giver gains prestige and also security by his or her generosity, since the receiver of the gift must give a counter gift or lose face (1960:337). In such a society a strong ethos of sharing and equality builds up in response to an abundance of food and the impossibility of amassing a surplus in order to dominate or outdo others. Competition, such as it is, is limited to an attempt to outdo others at generosity. There is abundance or a natural surplus, but it is non-storable, or rather the storing of any natural food would be a ludicrous endeavor.

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown notes that three kinds of people are accorded honor and respect in Andaman society: (1) older persons; (2) persons endowed with supernatural powers; and (3) individuals with certain skills that benefit society e.g., hunting or expertise in battle, as well as persons who are relatively free of ill temper and who are very generous and kind. This “inequality” is limited to the lifetime of the individuals being so honored by the group. The accord afforded these special persons is not institutionalized, nor can it be passed on to anyone else.

/./AGGRANDIZEMENT: A NATURAL TENDENCY

Anthropologists have not found any society that was completely egalitarian or free from aggrandizement by some members of the society. Even those very simple bands that have been ethnographically investigated show that some male dominance is exhibited in social interaction between the sexes and there are occasional efforts by aggrandizers to counter the general ethos of egalitarianism.

It would seem that such tendencies toward males trying to exert themselves in a dominant position over females and the efforts of aggrandizers, both male and female, to demonstrate their individualism are naturally embedded in their biology and mental structures. The universality of these tendencies demonstrates that empirically. But having said that, some societies are much more egalitarian than others. There are simple societies, and many more existed in the 6 million years of the Paleolithic, that exhibit[ed] “near equality.”

We have ethnographies that show us societies that come close to pure egalitarianism. Some privilege is usually accorded to those of advanced age, following the assumption that they have acquired wisdom and knowledge through the years, yet if an older person lacks these qualities, he or she will routinely be ignored or accorded nominal respect (Lenski 1984:110-111). In addition to age, gender is a divisive fact of life in all societies, though again, there is much variation in how sexual differences play out.

I agree with Marvin Harris that, contrary to those who would wish otherwise, we have no empirical evidence to indicate that any society is, or has ever been, entirely free of some form of discrimination (1993:59). For instance, in the politico-jural domain men always have a slight edge, taking the lead in political and military affairs. Elsie Begler (1978), writing from the point of view of a female anthropologist, Begler claims to have discovered in her cross-cultural analysis of various ethnographies on hunting and gathering societies that there are some where males seem to dominate, as in some Australian Aborigine groups and in Eskimo societies. She has termed these types of groups as “semi-egalitarian” while other groups, such as the Ju/’hoansi and the Mbuti, she says display equal status among males and females and these groups are term as “pure egalitarian” societies. The ethnographic facts from the Ju/’hoansi and Mbuti do not support her assertion. Certainly, they are “relatively” egalitarian, but males still hold a slight edge in social affairs in both. Among the Ju/’hoansi men more often hold positions of influence, as spokesmen and healers. This fact was expressed by both Ju/’hoansi women and men (Shostak 1981:237). There are differences in initiation rites as well: men’s are held in private, while those of women are public affairs. Perhaps the greatest indication that there is a significant difference between men and women is seen in the fact that if a menstruating Ju/’hoansi woman touches a man’s arrows they are thought to be polluted and will not find their target. On the other hand, men cannot pollute anything they touch. That is, with such differences we cannot consider male and females in Ju/’hoansi society to be equals. Furthermore, of the bare-handed, non-lethal attacks recorded by Lee (1979:453) 97 percent were men beating women and only one recorded case of a woman attacking a man. These were bare-fisted affairs, but men hold all the weapons and have a coercive psychological edge in gender relations. Shostak (1981:307) writes that when a conflict appears to be getting out of hand between men and women, the men are want to say: “I’m a man. I've got my arrows. I am not afraid to die.” Lee found that of known murders among the Ju/’hoansi, all were perpetrated by men and some of the victims were women.

For the Mbuti, Colin Turnbull (1961:127) indicates that men and women are not entirely equal. In public affairs, men take precedence. Men are associated with, hunting, power and influence, while women are allied with nurturing roles. This dichotomy comes out violently in male-female relations, since Mbuti men say that a certain amount of wife beating is good (1961:127). These facts do not indicate a peaceful and fully egalitarian society.

These ethnographic facts are important for our interest in how domination was fabricated in history. If there is, as I have tried to show, a natural tendency for men to dominate women and for aggrandizers to try to assert themselves and attempt to control other people; then the fact that such tendencies were kept to a bare minimum for most of the 6 million years of the Paleolithic Era is an astonishing fact. For all that time, the only institutions of domination to emerge were in the few storaging foragers, mostly those that had access to large quantities of fish. In the vast majority of Paleolithic bands, and in most of the living foragers today, self-aggrandizement was kept at a minimum and was channeled into socially acceptable activities e.g., hunting, foraging, shamanism and being one who could entertain others around the campfire. In all those societies, then and today, no major institutions of domination emerged, in spite of the biological and personality-based propensities toward aggression and self-aggrandizement found in all human groups.

This raises the question: what is different about those few Paleolithic societies where institutions of domination emerged and the vast majority of foraging societies where institutions of inequality did not? The answer is to be found in the material conditions of each society. In short, when they provide aggrandizers opportunities for accumulation, the ability to use their assertiveness to amass and store wealth, go-getters begin to formulate ideas and rules that provide them and their families an edge over others in the political realm based on their advantage in economics.

In the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes put forth a view that men were naturally aggressive and war was an inevitable consequence of humans living in social groups (1997 [1651]). Wherever humans gather there will also be the potential, even the probability of war. To Hobbes, this state of “war of all against war” necessitated government to guarantee peace. Since Hobbe’s groundbreaking work on the subject, thinkers have tried to understand why men are aggressive and why war is so widespread, in spite of Hobbes early belief that the application of Reason by government officials would curtail war.

Sanderson (nd: 38) notes that “social hierarchies have to be explained by all three modes of Darwinian conflict explanation, i.e., bio-, eco-, and polimaterialistically. Social hierarchies are biologically rooted but elaborated by a range of social and cultural conditions, especially those relating to economic and political organization.”

Jerome Barkow (1989) says that there is a natural human hunger for prestige that dominates much human behavior. Joseph Lopreato (1984) notes that humans have an innate desire for creature comforts. This is linked to primates as well where researchers have seen the virtual universality of hierarchy, especially in terrestrial primates, from whom humans are, descended (van den Berghe 1978).

Thusly, we see that biological anthropologists and sociobiologists are linking primate and human behavior, indicating that the desire for status, esteem and prestige are natural to both ourselves and our primate cousins. The result of this biologically or genetically lodged desire, it is very difficult for societies to maintain the egalitarianism of the non-storers of the long Paleolithic. Indeed, equally in egalitarian societies of the past and in the relatively egalitarian societies still in existence, equality is constantly challenged by those who want to rise above others (Woodburn 1982; Cashdan 1980).

In this sociobiological view, equality seems to be constantly challenged because the human brain has evolved to seek higher status and the material and positional indicators of success, all of which has a positive impact of reproductive success. That is, throughout the history of hominid evolution those individuals who exhibited such indicators left more progeny than those who did not. This is why in the long Paleolithic there was a constant need for the band to keep aggrandizers in check and why once a storable-stealable-surplus came into being

In his analysis of the work of Marvin Harris, Stephen Sanderson (nd: 27-28), in wondering about Harris’ analysis of the emergence of social class, says:

…Harris never does explain why ruling classes form in the first place, except to point to certain infrastructural conditions necessary for them to exist, and thus he begs the very question he is trying to answer. It is true that certain minimal infrastructural conditions are required for their existence, but this does not adequately explain why they always arise when those conditions are present. Surely there must be something about the organism and the way it interacts with those conditions that call forth ruling classes. In stressing the economically and politically egalitarian nature of band and tribal societies, Harris also fails to point out that these societies are filled with prestige- and power-seekers whose ambitions must be curtailed by the rest of the society, lest they get out of control. There seems to be more than a desire for love and approval that is motivating leaders in such societies; it is simply that they have to be satisfied with those outcomes because they will not be permitted anything more.

Sanderson apparently is in line with my way of thinking on aggrandizement. I see self-aggrandizement as a natural tendency that is hyperactive in more or less ten percent of any human population regardless of their social formations, cultural values or material conditions. However, this tendency toward achievement can be curtailed or stimulated by variation in any of these factors. One of the most stimulating causes of the release of aggrandizement by go-getters is the change from a non-storing to storing economy, a change that is set in motion by changes in the physicality or material circumstances in which the society operates.

But self-aggrandizement can be unleashed in a society that already values capitalistic aggrandizement, for example, as I point out in the case of Robert Mugabe and his band of thieves in Zimbabwe. Southern Rhodesia was a capitalist society par excellence and even though Mugabe and many of the freedom fighters that overthrew the capitalist regime of Ian Smith espoused socialist ideas, when the took over the reigns of power they seized the opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of the Zimbabwe people. This was a case where the material environment did not change, but the change in political power did, unleashing the pent up self-aggrandizement in Mugabe and his cronies.

Sanderson feels that Marvin Harris’ cultural materialism theoretical point of view is a good one, but is inadequate because of Harris’ failure to embrace sociobiology as another form of materialist explanation. He says “we need to push cultural materialism in a sociobiological direction and show how the two perspectives can be synthesized into a more comprehensive perspective whose explanations will be more adequate.”

I am also talking about the interaction of natural tendencies toward self-aggrandizement and the material world (the Northwest Coast case) and the social world (the Zimbabwe case). In other words, I agree that biology, environment and social forms interact, with causation primarily going from material to social to mental constructs. Sanderson (nd: 33-35) nicely lays this out in some detail in what he calls “Principles Concerning the Deep Wellsprings of Human Action.” The eight principles are:

(1.) Like all other species, humans are organisms that have been built by millions of years of biological evolution, both in their anatomy and physiology and in their behavioral predispositions. This means that theories of social life must take into consideration the basic features of human nature that are the products of human evolution.
(2.) The resources that humans struggle for, which allow them to survive and reproduce, are in short supply. This means that humans are caught up in a struggle for survival and reproduction with their fellow humans. This struggle is inevitable and unceasing.
(3.) In the struggle for survival and reproduction, humans give overwhelming priority to their self-interests and to those of their kin, especially their close kin.
(4.) Human social life is the complex product of this ceaseless struggle for survival and reproduction.
(5.) Humans have evolved strong behavioral predispositions that facilitate their success in the struggle for survival and reproduction. The most important of these predispositions are as follows:
• Humans are highly sexed and are oriented mostly toward heterosexual sex. This predisposition has evolved because it is necessary for the promotion of humans’ reproductive interests. Males compete for females and for sex, and females compete for males as resource providers.
• Humans are highly predisposed to perform effective parental behavior, and the female desire to nurture is stronger than the male desire. Effective parental behavior has evolved because it promotes reproductive success in a species like humans. The family as a social institution rests on a natural foundation.
• Humans are naturally competitive and highly predisposed toward status competition. Status competition is ultimately oriented toward the securing of resources, which promotes reproductive success. Because of sexual selection, the predisposition toward status competition is greater in males than in females.
• Because of the natural competition for resources, humans are economic animals. They are strongly oriented toward achieving economic satisfaction and well-being, an achievement that promotes reproductive success.
• In their pursuit of resources and closely related activities, humans, like other species, have evolved to maximize efficiency. Other things being equal, they prefer to carry out activities by minimizing the amount of time and energy they devote to these activities. A Law of Least Effort governs human behavior, especially those forms of behavior that individuals find burdensome or at least not rewarding in and of themselves. The Law of Least Effort places major limits on the behavior of humans everywhere; much behavior can only be explained satisfactorily by taking it into account.
(6.) None of the tendencies identified above are rigid. Rather, they are behavioral predispositions that move along certain lines rather than others but that interact in various ways with the total physical and sociocultural environment. The behavioral predispositions tend to win out in the long run, but they can be diminished, negated, or amplified by certain environmental arrangements.
(7.) From the above it follows that humans’ most important interests and concerns are reproductive, economic, and political. Political life is primarily a struggle to acquire and defend economic resources, and economic life is primarily a matter of using resources to promote reproductive success.
(8.) Many, probably most, of the features of human social life are the adaptive consequences of people struggling to satisfy their interests.

I agree with Sanderson that causation lies primarily in the biostructure and ecostructure (what Harris would call the material world, although he ignored the biostructure largely). These material factors affect social structure and mental formations. But it does not end there. As Sanderson points out “Once structures and superstructures have been built by biostructures and ecostructures, they may come to acquire a certain autonomy. New needs and new interests may arise therefrom, and these new needs and interests, along with reproductive, economic, and political interests, may form part of the human preference and value structure characteristic of the members of a society.” In other words, it is not mutually exclusive causation for which we should be looking, but rather how biostructure, ecostructure, social structure and mental structures interact to produce any given repetitive set of human behaviors, what Ruth Benedict in 1934 called “The Patterns of Culture” (Benedict 2006).

/./MANIPULATING SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Most hunter-gatherers who were making the transition to a farming way of life had lived in a world devoid of complex social structure. Aggrandizers had little to accumulate or control and no major rules or institutions with which to work to facilitate their self-aggrandizement. Little by little, however, aggrandizers formulated rules, codes and ideas that enabled them to build a social structure that was of benefit to them and their close associates. Once social structure was established and passed on from generation to generation, later aggrandizers had to deal with an already established body of custom. To effectuate changes that would be to their benefit new aggrandizers now had two aspects of manipulation with which to deal: (1) creating new rules, codes or ideas; (2) altering the existing rules, codes or ideas.

Obviously my analysis is based on a view of aggrandizers as “calculating men.” In anthropology, this view of Humankind has its traditions in the early functionalism of Malinowski (Kuper 1996: chapter 1) and the later developments of Leach and the Manchester School i.e., Max Gluckman and his associates (Kuper 1996: chapter 6). Leach, a student of Malinowski, pulled away from the more rigid structural functionalism of his early career in his 1954 book, POLITICAL SYSTEMS OF HIGHLAND BURMA. In it he indicated that he had come to see social structure and the rituals and customs of people as idealized abstractions. Both anthropologists and people living their culture make such abstractions in his view. According to Leach, any people use an “as if” or idealized view of their more complicated behavioral world to “get by” i.e., in order to live their lives they must ignore any contradictions in their customs or social structure. “Beneath these attempts at formalization lies the reality of individuals in pursuit of power. In this continual competition the actors make a series of choices that may cumulatively alter the structure of their society” (Kuper 1996:149-150). This was a view of human society that Gluckman would have understood, but not Fortes, who more than any other social anthropologist of the time closely adhered to the structural functionalism of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (see: Fortes 1969; Radcliffe-Brown 1952).

Leach expanded this view in this next major work, PUL ELIYA (1961). He had already established that people competed for power and had competitive relations with others, but hid this behind a “smoke screen” of an idealized model of how their society should work, even though this model was expressed in inexact symbolic or “fuzzy” terms. This “fuzziness” allowed them to manipulate alternatives “with an easy conscience and resolve contradictions at the ideological level” (Kuper 1999:152). In other words, the folk model had contradictions – and this is where I agree with Leach – and these actually allowed ambitious people (aggrandizers) to manipulate resources – political, economic and populational.

This perspective of manipulating managers, men who were fabricating social structure, was not acceptable to Fortes, who wanted to see social structure, and especially kinship, as sui generis, not something manufactured by calculating individuals. In the many hours I spent with Professor Fortes, formally and informally, he would never accept this perspective and he and Leach went round and round over this and many other theoretical differences in seminar after seminar during my years at Cambridge. I know that it irked Professor Fortes that PUL ELIYA essentially said that kinship was an epiphenomenon of property relations, merely an elastic, flexible idiom that people used to talk about property relations. The structural functionalists like Fortes felt that kinship constrained behavior rather than Leach’s contention that it was simply a mode of describing choices that revolved around material factors.

I know from personal experience that Fortes was very much against Marxist or materialist explanations of social phenomena. Once, when he and I were both at a conference in Lome, Togo, I read a paper that irked him (Mendonsa 1977). I explained Sisala high fertility in material terms i.e., that since more children were needed on the farm because a given farm laborer would produce far more food that he would consume, the Sisala patriarchs and male family heads wanted more children, with polygyny being a consequent marital choice given the material circumstances of their slash-and-burn horticulture. After the conference session, Fortes pulled me aside and chided me for not giving kinship a sui generis status. I was his student and perhaps students can be forgiven waywardness from time to time, but the very important Edmund Leach in print and in person was forever saying the same thing in other ethnographic situations. He was saying that not only did the kinship idiom operate purely as a means of making sense out of the material world, and perhaps as a way of covering the tracks of self-seeking aggrandizers, he was giving material causation priority over social ones. Fortes’ words to me at that conference break, as I remember, were: “Eugene that is a very dangerous premise.” That was in the mid 1970s and the world of the structural functionalists was drawing to a close and the next decade was to see the rise of materialist explanations. I had read PUL ELIYA and THE POLITICAL SYSTEMS OF HIGHLAND BURMA as a student, but I don’t remember if they influenced me all that much, but I too went in a materialist direction explaining Sisala life as a response to two factors: (1) the manipulations of self-seeking elder men and (2) as their responses to material conditions in Northern Ghana. Like Leach I came to see that kinship was sort of a smoke screen for choices made by powerful men that were largely influenced by self-interest and the desire for more power, prestige and property. Or, as Kuper (1999:155) nicely put it, “The ‘ideal ‘ norms are no more than a rough and ready mode of conceptualizing or orienting action, and their utility depends upon their ambiguity.” In a more recent article, “Political economy in a goatskin bag: Attempted symbolic power creation in Sisala divination” (Mendonsa 2003) I attempted to show that elders tried to manipulate their social life through divinatory means with material considerations in mind but were largely unsuccessful because they were trying to control younger men, largely to keep them farming for the elders, but that these youths had opportunities in the modern marketplace and desires for modernity that derived from globalization’s influence on their lives. Again, the twin factors of human choice being chiefly influenced by a desire for power, prestige and property.

With regard to aggrandizers in historical conditions of resource scarcity or material conditions that provided a storable, stealable surplus, this view of “man the seeker of power, prestige and property” provides an explanation of why humans made the transition from an egalitarian to a ranked society, with hierarchy turning into stratification, eventually culminating in the worldwide success of capitalism. The arrival of a surplus gave go-getters an edge and the ability to fiddle the system to their advantage, even if that disadvantaged others.

What about resistance? Societies are, by nature, conservative i.e., people find a niche and are hesitant to change behavior unless clear benefit is seen in such change (Upham 1990:10). There are, then, strong forces of cohesion that early aggrandizers needed to overcome. How did they do that? Of course, we don’t know the details, but the Yakut-Mono data from these early California sedentary foragers gives us a hint. Yakut-Mono little chiefs, men who were not formal chiefs yet, but who aspired to control others, worked in conjunction with shamans giving the appearance that their efforts to organize villagers had supernatural backing (see the section: “The creation of symbols of power” below). This was one tactic of early aggrandizers. There must have been multiple approaches, but whatever means they took, their job was to establish legitimate power or authority, not just raw power. If they bullied people in the beginning, they had to convert that power to authority. In other words, they had to overcome their society's inertia in order to create social mechanisms by which they could control labor and inordinately access the surplus value of their labor. In communal societies, where sharing is valued and individual advancement is frowned upon, early aggrandizers had to convey to others that it was in their interest to cooperate and go along with plans to behave in ways that ran counter to the egalitarian ethos of the group. Early leaders had to create offices, power positions and they had to formulate a new division of labor. They also had to fabricate new ideas about the control of resources i.e., property ownership. When I speak of resources that early aggrandizers wished to control, land is the obvious one for farmers and grazing fields for herders; but for sedentary foragers resources may simply be fishing spots or trees that produce acorns or piñon nuts. It is not territory alone, in the sense of a “territorial imperative” (Ardrey 1971), but rather any resources that provide a living for the people. When highly productive resources are available, but in scarce supply e.g., prime fishing points on rivers that have prolific annual runs of salmon, then go-getters often move to capture those spots for themselves. Once they have excessive income from these resources they can begin to convert their wealth into political power and prestige.

To make their political and economic control last, these early organizers had to develop consent among their groups. Their actions, if considered illegitimate would not endure. But what do I mean by consent? Does this mean that early aggrandizers were able to bring about a quick revolution? No. Surely revolutionary changes took time, most likely generations to accomplish. If I know anything about human groups, I would postulate that the development of consent was never complete. There would have been defectors, those who left the group in protest. With circumscription (Carneiro 1988) defection would not have been an option and the group would have been left with those who saw the change as good, those who didn’t have much of an opinion on the matter and those who were “grumbling resisters.”

The task of the nascent politicos must not have been easy, but obviously they succeeded since history shows us a steady progression of political complexity from little chiefs, to chiefs, to kings, to emperors or some variation of that sequence. We also see a shift from communal ownership to private property. They also had to convert a social grouping with diffuse power to a more centralized form e.g., a chiefship. In short, society has been moved by the actions of aggrandizers from simple to complex and that was not an automatic or easy process. Men had to grab the reins of the social fabric and alter the ethos of conservatism in order to bring about change and greater complexity.

What is meant by greater complexity? Netting (1990:22) provides a quick view of some of the significant variables involved in simple vs. complex societies. He sees earlier simple societies as having:

● A sparse population
● A dispersed, impermanent settlement pattern
● A shifting agriculture system
● A kin group or lineage as a productive group
● An undifferentiated division of labor or set of occupations
● Communal ownership of resources & egalitarianism
● Acephalous political organization
● Local autonomy

While later complex societies have:

● A dense population
● A nucleated, sedentary settlement pattern
● A intensive agriculture system
● A neighborhood or village as a productive group
● Specialized crafts, trade and government
● Private ownership of resources & inequality
● Centralized political organization (chiefdoms, states)
● Tributary relations

Complexity is a great thing for aggrandizers because in its web of rules and ideas they can spin new ones and bend old one to achieve their ends. Let me give you one example from our modern world in 21st century America. Michael Van Alstine (2006-2007:309) notes that the second Bush administration felt that since the constitution was silent or vague on executive powers in unilaterally, without congressional consent, pursuing its own lines in dealing with foreign matters is could act independently of congress or any other oversight body. President George W. Bush issued a surprise “Determination” that asserted that executive powers implied in Article II of the U.S. Constitution permitted him both to create and to unilaterally enforce the foreign affairs of the USA under international law. Bush is not the only President to do this. Van Alstine continues, “Unfortunately the Constitution’s text provides only limited guidance on the president’s legal powers on this score. Nonetheless, as the Article describes, the supposed constitutional silence has motivated numerous presidents to assert a domestic lawmaking authority to advance executive branch policy preferences in foreign affairs.”

Here we see a modern example of what aggrandizers have been doing since there was power and wealth to be pursued. Acting on the “silence” of a document to prevent a desired action is, however, a particularly egregious example of aggrandizement by those in office. In a more general sense, social and legal structures have a great deal of vagueness to them and allow aggrandizing office-holders and their subordinates great leeway in making policy. Mary Parker Follett’s concept of the “law of the situation” (2009 [1918])is an example of how precedent and existing rules can be circumvented in a search for solutions to management problems governed by the “demands of the situation” and not by reference to any authority or principle. Unscrupulous office-holders have seen this as a license to ignore law in the pursuit of their own and sometimes self-aggrandizing goals.

Laws and rule-sets always contain ambiguity and interstices that make them open to interpretation and manipulation by those who attempt to circumvent authoritative precedents. Complexity itself can be an aid in the modern world, where bevies of attorneys cannot seem to agree on simple things like the legal status of waterboarding. In the nooks and crannies of legal and administrative structures office-holders, then, may find it safe to play loose with the rules in their pursuit of power, prestige and property. The other factor that makes rule avoidance or manipulation of the rules possible in the modern world is the distance of the office-holders from the common man. Transparency or insight into the inner workings of government or corporations today is very difficult to bring about. That distance and lack of vulnerability on the part of office-holders, and concomitantly the effeteness of individuals attempting to negate high office shenanigans, has grown as political systems and business organizations have evolved since the inception of the Neolithic. It was much harder, for example, to reach the emperor than it was to interact with and watch a simple headman or little chief.

This is nicely portrayed in ÉLITE DEVIANCE (Simon 2002), which describes wrongdoing – criminal, moral, ethical – by wealthy and powerful office-holders in corporate and governmental organizations. Deviant acts of economic and political élites are not described as random events, but rather as related to the very structure of wealth and power in the USA and to processes which maintain such structures. Simon shows that American élite office-holders and other powerful persons in strategic positions in our society practice a systematic violation of the laws and ethics of business and politics that include everything from hiring prostitutes to finalize business agreements, to using members of criminal syndicates to gain a business or political advantage over opponents. Business executives regularly receive special advantages from government, such as tax exemptions and subsidies, according to the author. The monopolistic structure of the U.S. economy facilitates economic deviance through price gouging, price fixing, deceptive advertising and fraud. Hazardous products, pollution, dangerous working conditions and resource waste are also generated by privileged leaders. Simon also avows that the U.S. defense policy lends global dimensions to political and corporate deviance in the areas of defense contracting and arms sales where politicos, corporate salesmen and their agents regularly bribe to obtain contracts, badger government officials and purchasing agents, dump dangerous products and encourage violations of human rights. Not unlike many other places in the world, widespread deviance is rampant in high places in the USA, according to this book.

/./OWNERSHIP

Property rights emerged when there were valuable resources to be captured e.g., key fishing spots or groves of food-producing trees. It happened slowly, for example, among the Maidu of California, who were storer-foragers and fishers who had a sense of territory, each named tribelet claiming ownership of the land, communally. On such lands, they groomed their resources with fire to make hunting easier and by tending local groves of oak trees from which they derived their staple food source, acorns. They are an example of a storing forager tribe, with sedentary villages, a stratified society, secret societies, little chiefs and shamans, private property, inheritance, blood feud and warfare. They are a good example of a sedentary forager society that demonstrates the emergence of social complexity, though not as dramatically as among the fishers of the Northwest Coast.

Dixson (1905:225) notes that, especially among the Northern Maidu prime fishing spots were considered private property, or owned by families; while most other resources were communally owned by the whole group. Apparently the Southern Maidu had no such individual or familial property rights. He does not explain this difference or whether the terrain in each zone was different causing the rise of property rights in one zone and not the other. For whatever reason private and familial ownership was emerging in the north and not the south. It seems that fishing hole ownership stimulated the application of property rights to other resources e.g., while all land was considered open hunting grounds, if a family erected a deer-drive fence no other family could also erect such a fence in that area, though they could continue to hunt it without a fence of their own.

The Maidu held a belief that excessive wealth was contemptuous, yet some were able to accumulate more wealth than others. As a leveling device, they held annual burnings in honor of the dead, at which the wealthy were expected to burn more of their possessions than the poorer members of the tribe. Also, at his death, most or all of a man’s possessions were burned, so inheritance was severely limited, with only fishing spots and deer-drive fences being passed on in the male line.

The Maidu had different communities, which were named. They lived in sections of land, which were in modern-day Northern California in named tribelets or communities. In modern-day Butte County, there were four such communities, each with a distinctive emblem: the Bald Rock people; the Bidwell Bar tribelet; the Oroville community; and the Mooretown & Swede’s Flat folk. Their set territories were marked in the corners by their unique emblems. Resources within these territories were considered to be the property of the named group. Such fixed territoriality is absent in non-storing foragers, though they may have a sense of boundaries, but often choose to cooperate with their neighbors.

With the more set boundaries of the Maidu, conflict and even warfare emerged between the named groups, usually over trespass by a neighboring hunting party or the perceived intrigues of foreign shamans. They even had permanent guards selected by the chief to guard the boundaries of their community (Dixon 1905:226). A neighboring hunter who shot an animal on his own territory was allowed to follow the game into a foreign territory for a short distance in order to retrieve his meat, but conflicts sometimes arose over ownership of the dead animal.

/./PALEOLITHIC WARLESSNESS

Kelly (2000:3) defines war as that which “entails armed conflict that is collectively carried out.” This differs from ad hoc altercations between individuals, which must have taken place all throughout prehistory and have not gone away to this day. Widespread warfare occurred rather suddenly in human life. Other minor forms of conflict have always been a feature of human existence.

One of my main theoretical points is that the development of a surplus of food, largely after the Agricultural Revolution, stimulated the emergence of hierarchical human relations and that chronic warfare was not prevalent in the long Paleolithic. Only after the domestication of plants and animals did economic change bring large-scale warfare into human life. Food storage led to greater risk of hostility with neighbors who wanted the food.

A key causal variable in the development of warfare in both sedentary foragers and Neolithic farmers was the presence of strategic sites. For the Northwest Coast Amerindians, for example, such sites were primes fishing spots. For those trading foodstuffs along early Neolithic routes in the Near East the strategic sites were trade routes that had to be defended (Roper 1975:330). The only strategic sites in the long Paleolithic, before the emergence of the few sedentary foragers, were waterholes, and these were usually shared with strangers if they asked to use them and were not something to fight over on a regular basis.

For this last point to be credible we must have data that indicate that Paleolithic peoples did not have large-scale warfare and that it only came about when some societies developed a surplus. Increased hostility and conflict occurred in the first instance in the few sedentary foragers of the Paleolithic; and in the second and greater instance with the emergence of agriculture and animal herding. But were most Paleolithic foragers also belligerent toward neighbors and did that aggressiveness lead to large-scale warfare? Did they fight over food? Let's go back beyond the hominids and look at primate studies.

The data from primates indicates that selection has favored a hunt and kill propensity and coalitional killing (Wrangham & Peterson 1997). For primates hostility toward neighboring groups leads to greater access to resources with minimal risk and increases their food-getting territory. Primates, such as chimpanzees, often go into the land of other chimps and gang up on individuals or small groups to kill them. Their aim is to kill or scare away those threatening their food supply. The result of wiping out a nearby group or driving them away is to have greater territory and therefore access to greater resources. Potential risk is reduced in primates, as opposed to tool-using hominids and later Homo sapiens, because primates lack weapons.

Without weapons, and using coalitional tactics, mobs of chimps often gang up on individual strangers or smaller alien groups. Wrangham & Peterson claim that this has evolutionary advantage. They also indicate that it is likely that humans share this trait.

However, Kelly argues that once hominids developed lethal weapons, beginning with the fire-hardened wooden throwing spear, human life became more cooperative rather than combative (ca. 400 thousand YBP). Weapons elevated risk of serious injury or fatalities in combat. He writes: “The selective factors that give rise to coalitional killing of neighboring group members among chimpanzees do not have the same effects in the case of unsegmented foraging societies” (2005:15296).

Tool-using hominids and humans had another tool that distinguished them from primates – symbolization or communication. Foraging societies of the Paleolithic did not use coalitional killing techniques found among primates because the risk of serious injury or death was too high and expansion of access to the resources of neighboring groups could more easily be accomplished through cooperative hunts and joint foraging parties. Also, outright aggression in the Paleolithic led to “stalemate and a condition analogous to a war of attrition rather than territorial gain” (Kelly 2005:15297).

Furthermore, it seems our distant ancestors enjoyed the festive nature of such get-togethers more than war sorties. The risk-reward balance was heavily skewed in the direction of communication and cooperative interaction over combat. There were both caloric rewards and social ones.

It is not that competition did not exist, but that it could be largely confined to festive communal activities e.g., among the Andaman Island foragers each individual participant in collective hunts or foraging sessions “endeavored to outdo his or her counterpart in generosity” (Kelly 2005:15297). There were also dance and song competitions.

It therefore seems that Paleolithic foragers largely used a “repertoire of peace-promoting practices” if the Andaman data can be considered indicative of Paleolithic activities. It seems probable that ethnographic data do show the way because the Andaman research clearly shows that:

When relations with neighbors are friendly, an average-sized territory of 16.4 square miles is capable of supporting a band of 45 individuals. Hostile relations shrink the utilizable area to the equivalent of 12 square miles, with a peripheral zone about one-third of a mile wide subject to border avoidance. This reduced territory is sufficient to support a band of only 33 individuals. (Kelly 2005:15296)

The border areas were the most dangerous. Both primates and Paleolithic hunters limited their aggressive forays to border areas. Kelly continues: “Attacks on bases camps where group members sleep are nonexistent among chimpanzees and rare to nonexistent on the part of unsegmented foraging societies.” Hostile relations with neighbors is inversely correlated with increased capacity to get food and positively correlated with the risk of injury or death. The land adjacent to truculent neighbors was threatening. Hunting or foraging there could lead to ambushes. Consequently, it is probable that, like modern day foragers in the Andaman Islands, Paleolithic hunters and foragers feared going into border zones near hostile neighbors, as waylays were always a threat.

In the Andaman situation it was better to cooperate and form joint food-getting parties, both hunting and foraging, because by cooperating a band could actually sustain themselves better and grow larger in population. Intimidation cut into security, but there were other considerations. Also, in addition to the reduction of the danger of attacks, injury and the loss of life, meetings between neighbors brought sociality and conviviality at joint events, as well as a chance to find mates. Cross-border marriage alliances would further strengthen the peace. Primates lack this heightened ability to communicate and advance their security by peaceful means.

Members of foraging groups in our ethnographic data and, by analogy, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers increased their fitness by improving access to resources e.g., food, females and safety by eschewing efforts to gain intercommunity dominance. They favored developing egalitarian relationships of friendship, mutuality and sharing. Dominance being largely unattainable, hunter-gatherers sought to advance positive connectivity with surrounding groups. Based on a history of positive relations they could then increase their reproductive rate by increasing access to females. Kelly (2005:15296)

The noted anthropologist Raymond Kelly and I seem to agree that widespread warfare did not permeate Paleolithic life. He says:

The period of Paleolithic warlessness, grounded in low population density, an appreciation of the benefits of positive relations with neighbors, and a healthy respect for their defensive capabilities, lasted until the cultural development of segmental forms of organization engendered the origin of war (Kelly 2005:15297)

Occasional violence must have occurred over the long Paleolithic, but the archaeological data are slim and inconclusive about even occasional hominid to hominid violence (Roper 1969). The few fossilized remains that have been recovered show that certain individuals may have engaged in some type of violence due to broken skulls. But Roper indicates that there is no clear evidence that during the Pleistocene different species of hominids that shared the same living space were engaged in violence on each other or even that death was brought about by members from another group. In other words, the fossil record provides little evidence of violence, let alone warfare, within hunter-gathering societies prior to the emergence of agriculture and herding (Kelly 2000:1).

The archaeological evidence points to the fact that warfare did not emerge until “quite late in human history” (Kelly 2000:1), with the first generally accepted evidence of it coming in the Near East between ca. 14 thousand and 12 thousand YBP. In fact, warfare originates rather abruptly. At that point the record shows fortifications, garrisons and site destruction and the earliest historical records document frequent warfare in disputes over land and water rights, both of which were crucial to Neolithic farmers in the production of a storable surplus. Kelly (2000:2) concludes that “hunter-gatherer societies were warless and that the Paleolithic (extending from 2,900,000 to 10,000 B. P.) was a time of universal peace” (for a contrary view see: Ember 1978).

Was there any kind of violence in the long Paleolithic among non-sedentary foragers? I'll bet there was, but it wasn’t warfare, which requires men to organize a raid in which they intend to kill and maim the enemy and/or steal something valuable from them in the process. True war also entails a moral component i.e., the warriors have the backing of their society and can raise their prestige by participating in the raid (Kelly 2000:6). They can return to societal acclaim as heroes. A Paleolithic hunter who spontaneously fires an arrow at strangers and thereby creates bad blood between two groups may not have the backing of his compatriots and may actually be negatively regarded as having created a problem. Most ethnographic and archaeological data indicate that non-sedentary foragers did not engage in large-scale warfare and the likelihood is that the ethos of the day was one of pacifism and not militarism. Bonta (1996) found this to be the case in his study of modern day peaceful societies – they simply held a very negative view of conflict and violence.

Logically, based on all the evidence available, the long Paleolithic was characterized by rare short-lived outbursts of violence but not frequent, organized, morally justifiable warfare. Fabbro (1978:80) found that the peaceful societies he studied produced little surplus so that there was no significant material inequalities or the emergence of coercive leadership or powers based on the application of force or its threat. This finding is consistent with Fried’s (1967) observations regarding egalitarian societies.

Thus, Fabbro’s work confirms the view of small-scale, face-to-face bands as being more peaceful than more hierarchical societies, accomplishing this without hierarchy or coercion; but he found two cases that seem to contradict this view. One comes from ethnographic data on the Hutterites (Hostetler & Hunntington 1967; Hostetler 1974). They are an example of an hierarchical, authoritarian society that is peaceful. Yet, unlike most other peaceful societies in Fabbro’s study that practiced easy and peaceful childrearing, the Hutterites physically and severely keep their children in line and require them to adhere to what is considered God’s pathway. The larger non-violence in the cult is achieved by bullying, intimidating and browbeating their children, a form of violence. They also practice corporal punishment. Big peace is achieved at the expense of small violence, not unlike that which exists in large-scale societies with penal codes. In most of the peaceful societies studied by Fabbro not only was there no war; but also adults did not punish adults, except by threat of ostracism or the sting of gossip. In other words, the Hutterites are not a peaceful society if one considers the use of severe punishment to keep people in line. Furthermore, the society is a strong patriarchy, which women may find to be a form of violence.

The other case that seems to contradict Fabbro’s main finding that a peaceful ethos leads to the absence of violence in small societies is that of Tristan da Cunha, a small pair of islands near South Africa inhabited by the 275 European ex-patriots (2009 figures). The ideal ethos of the community is based on egalitarianism, sexual equality, communal ownership and freedom from government control (Munch 1971). However, after some time communal ownership gave way to private property and, like the Hutterites, the ideal of peaceful behavior is not achieved. Even with an ethos of peace paradoxically “it is through threats or acts of physical punishment that children are inculcated with the importance of non-violent behaviour” (Loudon 1970:307). In most peaceful societies socialization is “permissive (Kelly 2000:16). There is also physical violence between spouses in Tristan da Cunha (Fabbro 1978:78).

Thus, while there is an absence of formal war or inter-group violence, as with the Hutterites, violence is evident in their authoritarian child-rearing practices and in domestic disputes. One could say that they are filled with latent violence. Both of these societies, the Hutterites and the tiny population of Tristan da Cunha, are small groups with little need for, or possibility of, war – both being under the larger geopolitical over-lordship of nation-states. In both, as with most planned attempts at communalism, in time, hierarchy and male dominance emerge. This is not the case in most hunter-gatherers of the modern day and presumably of our distant Paleolithic ancestors.

From the ethnographic record and from archaeological data we can conclude that occasional violence takes place in small-scale societies but that this is not necessarily correlated with organized warfare. Societies lacking warfare do not necessarily show an absence of violence. In fact, homicide rates in such societies are “considerably higher than those reported for agricultural societies with more developed forms of sociopolitical organizations” (Kelly 2000:20). Kelly goes on to note:

The critical feature that distinguishes warless from warlike societies therefore cannot be a low incidence of homicide. This in turn casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that one form of violence begets another, as applied to the origin of war, since it is evident that a high homicide rate does not engender a warlike society. War is not related to violence as simply more of the same, but instead entails the deployment of violence in accordance with a distinctive logic, contingent upon concepts rooted in the sociocultural system (2000:21).

So we can safely say that warfare is an episodic feature of human prehistory and history. It is seen at certain times and places but not at others (Kelly 2000:124). Furthermore, humans have the capacity to settle disputes with minimal violence or even through negotiation. Since war is not a universal feature of human life and was not a major part of hominid or early human existence in the Paleolithic, then it must have begun at some juncture in the human past. It was not a carryover from the majority of bands, the societal type represented by unsegmented societies in the Paleolithic.

/./THE IMPORTANCE OF SEGMENTATION & HIERARCHY IN THE EMERGENCE OF WAR

Kelly (2000: chapter 2) notes that the development of segmentation is a key causal variable in the emergence of war. It is lacking in most of Fabbro’s sample of peaceful societies and present in most warlike societies (1978). Segmentation of a group is also at least a covariant of the rise of élites and inequality in my view. It is, therefore, important that we understand what an unsegmented society is and how it differs from a segmented one.

Unsegmented societies have a minimum degree of elaboration of social groups; while segmented societies are internally segmented e.g., into lineage, moieties or clans. No level of organization beyond the local community is found in unsegmented groups; while in segmented ones there are levels of organization beyond the local community. Within the local group of unsegmented societies, families are usually identifiable as detachable constituent units; while in segmented societies, within the local group, families are not identifiable as detachable constituent units but are one segment in a larger grouping. In unsegmented societies, nuclear families tend to predominate within the local group; while in unsegmented societies nuclear families are only one form of family organization and corporate extended families are common. In unsegmented the culturally recognized coactive groups are limited to the family and local community; while in segmented societies, the culturally recognized coactive groups found are not limited to the family and local community. In unsegmented societies there are no units that are equivalent in structure and function; while in segmented societies segments are units that are equivalent in structure and function. In unsegmented society there is not segmental organization and no segmental hierarchy; while in segmented societies there is both segmental organization and segmental hierarchy and segmental organization is a combination of like segments into progressively more inclusive groups within a segmentary hierarchy. Unsegmented groups show no corporations of any sort; while corporations are a common feature of segmented societies e.g., lineages and clans. Unsegmented societies lack social substitutability and there is no wergild; while social substitutability is a feature of corporate groups in segmented societies and the wergild may be found. Unsegmented societies lack descent groups, but may have egocentric bilateral kin networks or kindreds; while segmented societies have descent groups. In unsegmented societies there is no rule-bound marital exchange between set groups; while rule-bound marital exchange between set groups is common in segmented societies. In marriage in unsegmented societies, there is no significant transfer of valuables, though brideservice may exist; however in segmented societies both exist. In the ATLAS OF WORLD
CULTURES (Murdock 1981) there are only 32 of 563 societies (5.68%) that are unsegmented; while there are 551 segmented societies (94.32%).

The significance of the vast difference between the percentage of unsegmented and segmented societies is that in Fabbro’s (1978) study of peaceful societies he found that unsegmented societies tended to be peaceful, with only two instances of segmented societies showing peaceful characteristics.

There is further empirical confirmation of the thesis that segmentation and social substitutability are key factors causing warlike attitudes in a society. Ross (1983) sampled the ethnographic data on 90 societies, of which 25 were foragers, as defined by them having less than 25% of their sustenance derived from domesticated plants or animals. Of these 25 foraging groups, 8 were of the unsegmented type and 17 did not conform to this organizational type, that is, they had instances of social substitutability and/or some degree of segmentation. His data show a very strong association between the low frequency of warfare and the unsegmented organizational type. In other words, warless societies lacked the organizational features associated with segmentation and social substitutability, those attributes that are conducive to the development of group concept e.g., us vs. them.

We can safely assume that hominids and early human hunter-gatherers were unsegmented and that, for some reason, segmentation occurred after a very long period of time, and rather abruptly. Its initial appearance was in the late Paleolithic among sedentary foragers e.g., the Northwest Coast Amerindians and the Calusa of Florida, but segmentation proliferated once animals and plants were domesticated. In both of these cases, sedentary foragers and domesticators, the common variable is the presence of strategic resources that produce a storable-stealable-surplus. Once this situation obtained, aggrandizers moved to secure the surplus and did so by building institutions of authority e.g., chiefdoms and priesthoods.

Again, Ericksen & Horton (1992) provide cross-cultural data that shows that unsegmented societies uniformly do not have the cultural concept of group liability or institutions such as the wergild, where vengeance is taken out on any member of the offender’s (e.g., one who has killed a member of their kin group) kin group. That is, social substitutability is lacking in unsegmented societies in their data set. They also found that the absence of kin group responsibility in hunter-gatherer societies made it seven times more likely in those societies that individual self-redress would be used than in other types of societies e.g., farmers or herders (1992:73-74). Also those foragers that had some segmentation tended to have the concept of group responsibility and the practice of blood feud. Unsegmented societies lack the defining characteristics of the blood feud and certainly do not have organized warfare, with the intent of dominating another society, seeking land, labor or prestige (Wright 1942:560-561).

Kelly (2000:133, 136) writes:

Warfare is typically rare to nonexistent within and between unsegmented foraging societies inhabiting environments characterized by low resource density, diversity, and predictability at densities below 0.2 persons per square mile. … Spontaneous conflict over access to resources occur both within and between unsegmented foraging societies in environments that are rich in naturally occurring subsistence resources, that are characterized by high resource density, diversity and reliability, and that support population densities in excess of 0.2 persons per square mile. The incidence and severity of conflict is amplified by higher population densities and/or environmental circumscription (cf. Carneiro 1988).

All the data I have referenced indicate that pre-planned group efforts to exact vengeance are rare to non-existent in unsegmented foraging societies. Once a society, even a hunter-gathering one, develops segmentation the concept of social substitutability emerges and we see members participating in institutionalized blood feud.

What is significant for my theory is that pre-planned collective efforts to raid an enemy require some degree of leadership and preparation. It is a time for aggrandizers to shine and as history shows, feud is not a dead end street. Warfare develops next and this provides alpha males an opportunity to take leadership roles, which usually do not stop there, as go-getters have, throughout history, found ways to translate military success into political authority. Blood feud is a stepping stone for aggrandizers who aspire to be grandees, which of course is a cognate word, both coming from the Latin “adgrandir” – to increase, as in increasing one’s power or status. Logically, such go-getters began to engage in warfare, the building of political institutions, often in conjunction with religious ones and also fabricating the idea of male superiority, which in time led to patriarchy. These ideas, activities and institutions are related to militarism.

In my own fieldwork in Ghana among the Sisala people I saw how segmentation works, both to create conflicts and to resolve them, but the process took leadership (Mendonsa 1982; 2000; 2001; 2003). Let's look at one case to illustrate this point. The western Sisala where I did my fieldwork are a patrilineal people with clans, which are divided into lineages, several of which make up a village. My village of Bujan was made up of nine patrilineages divided into two moieties, with three lineages on the Fokorniaa side (descendants of Fokor) and six on the side called Fuoniaa (descendants of Fuo). The principle lineage in the Fokorniaa was Fokorjang; while the senior lineage in the other moiety was Fuojang. Lineages were the only corporate groups farming together and sharing food. Moieties were nominal units only, with no corporate functions, though Fuonia was said to be the “elder brother” of Fokorniaa. I suspect that the first settlers of Fokorniaa came late to the village and could have even been strangers, though they may have been clan members. In any case, they were considered clansmen and junior kin to the members of Fuoniaa.

Bujan was one of several villages comprising the Crocodile clan, an exogamous unit. It was not a corporate unit, but did have a clan ritual leader, an earth priest, who periodically presided over ancestral sacrifices thought to benefit the whole clan. It was forbidden to have sex with or marry any classificatory “sister” or “mother” within the clan. This meant that a young man would have to travel miles to find a legitimate lover. Many made the trip, especially on market days in distant clans.

I knew of only one case where it was known that there was an ongoing sexual relationship between a “brother” and a “sister” from our village, each coming from opposite moieties. No one was able to stop the tryst and people said that it would one day cause the village trouble.

But that was a rarity. Most illicit love affairs in the village were between young men and wives of their “brothers” and sometimes their “fathers,” as older husbands married polygamously could have young, attractive wives. This case is about one such affair, which ran against the norm that stated that one never sleeps with the wife of a kinsman, unless he dies and the wife is inherited and taken as a wife by the surviving brother.

I will call the couple involved by the fictitious names of Halu, a female; and Batong, the male in question. Halu, a young wife in her twenties, was married to a man in the moiety of Fuoniaa and Batong, a young unmarried man, was of the Fokorniaa moiety.

One morning while I was still in my hut I heard shouting and went outside to see young men armed with spears, hoes and axes threatening each other in the “no-man’s-land” that separated Fuoniaa from Fokorniaa. There was much shouting involved.

My hut was next to that of the clan earth priest in Fuoniaa moiety and he, a very old man, came out after me. He surveyed the situation and quickly dispatched a small boy on an errand. He disappeared into the maze of lineages of Fuoniaa.

About the same time there were deafening screams coming from one of the lineage compounds in Fuoniaa and I later learned that the husband and his brothers were beating Halu for having slipped out of the compound during the night to sleep with Batong. This was not an illegal act, according to clan law, but a foolish one, for every night the main gate of each lineage is “locked” by placing a long piece of elephant grass across the opening. This is a signal for lineage members to remain inside, for outside there were thought to be witches and there surely were deadly snakes. Most people stayed inside. I found out that the husband had gone to Halu’s room during the night and found her gone. He did not know where she had gone and, at first, he thought that perhaps she had merely gone to defecate in the bush. When she did not return for hours he called his brothers and they waited for her at the lineage gate. When she tried to sneak back in just before daybreak they jumped her and beat her with their fists. One old man hit her repeatedly with his walking stick, but, being blind, he wasn’t very accurate and later one of the men told me that he hit them more than the transgressing wife. It was a story that got amplified with the telling and became a source of merriment around the village fires.

I was torn between observing the young men in the open space, who I thought would soon come to blows; and going over to the sounds of a screaming woman. I stayed next to the earth priest because I figured that was where the anthropological interest would lie. I was not disappointed.

Shortly the little boy returned to the side of the earth priest with another old man in tow. I knew this man to be the “eldest elder” of Bujan. This is a formal office and he is often called upon to settle disputes and is one of the presiding elders at ancestral sacrifices. He and the clan’s earth priest conferred briefly and then they sent the boy off again. This time he returned rather quickly with a tin plate full of ash from a fireplace.

The earth priest took the plate of ash and, with the other old man, ambled toward the combatants, although the young men were doing nothing more than shouting insults at each other.

Let is be said that this was no small matter to the clan earth priest and the senior man of Bujan. According to Sisala lore, to spill the blood of a clansman, or to have sex with a clanswoman, would anger the clan ancestors to the point that they would cause all sorts of misfortune to befall the clan e.g., crops would fail, women would miscarry, people would become ill and others would die.

The two old men hurried as fast as their frail legs would take them to the scene of the confrontation, where the Fuoniaa chaps were facing the young men of Fokorniaa, all brandishing weapons that could cause blood to spill upon the earth, thus insuring a catastrophe for the clan.

This was a conflict between two segments of the segmentary lineage system (Smith 1956; Sahlins 1961). It is what social anthropologists call “structural conflict,” where one segment feels wronged by another and feels the need to retaliate. Those attacked (in this case the Fokornia boys came out and shouted first at the still sleepy Fuoniaa boys to “come out and fight!) equally felt the responsibility to defend the honor of their unit, in this case the Fuoniaa moiety. In an unsegmented society, the husband would probably have gone over and beat up or killed Batong. In this segmented case, it was a group affair.

If the segmentation caused the ruckus; it also resolved it without bloodshed. The two groups of shouting youth stood face-to-face, about ten feet apart. The earth priest and the senior elder of Bujan placed themselves in between the shouting men, who totaled about twenty, with a few more on the Fokorniaa side.

When the earth priest spoke, the combatants fell silent. He admonished them to stop before blood was spilt on clan ground and he went into some detail about the consequences of such an event. The confrontation turned into a classroom.

Then the senior elder of the village spoke and, in Sisala fashion, repeated most of what the earth priest had already said. While he was speaking, the earth priest took the plate of ash and dribbled a white line on the earth separating the two sides of potential combatants. When he was done, he again spoke, this time at some length. The young men were silent, but fidgety. The earth priest noted that they could not cross that line of white, cool ash from the once hot fire. It was a metaphor and a ritual symbol, the kind for which every ethnographer waits. He explains that if they crossed the line of ash, the clan ancestors, who obviously, like the earth priest himself, had jurisdiction became they held clan authority over both the Fokorniaa moiety and that of the Fuoniaa clansmen. He was pulling rank on them. He made this point repeatedly, which was great for note taking: “as this ash was once part of a raging fire; it is now cool. Your fires are raging in your hearts, but they too, like the ash, must be cool.” Hot and cold are Sisala symbols that all would immediately understand. The illicit affair was a hot thing, but the spilling of clan blood would be even hotter. A hot thing does not make a hot thing right. Only a cool thing does that. That was the logic. Breaking clan rules makes things hot. Becoming angry over such a delict also creates unwanted heat. Hot things make the ancestors angry and they will spill misfortune on the clansmen if the hot things are not cooled. This was the council of the elders, who by this time had been joined by all the senior men in the village.

After the sermons, which bored the young warriors, as sermons are want to do, they dispersed, grumbling their way back to their respective moieties, bowing to the higher authority of the clan and the unseen supernatural power of the ancestors. Of course, several sacrifices had to be made by the senior men of the Fokorniaa to placate the ancestors of the clan, so as not to cause any more trouble. All was smoothed over until the next group conflict produced by the nature of their segmentary social structure. It was a group vs. group affair but had the segmentation been absent, as in a band of hunter-gatherers for example, most likely it would have been a conflict between individuals, not segments of kin groups.

Segmentation was a bedfellow of hierarchy. Both can be said to be a cause of warfare, since it is difficult to interlock two or more separate hierarchies without conflict. When a storable, stealable surplus stimulated the rise of élites and ranks in society, leaders needed to defend their surplus and some became especially aggressive and tried to steal from others, hence the rise of warfare coincided with the emergence of the first segmented and ranked societies.

Unsegmented societies that existed in most places for a long period of time before the emergence of a few segmented sedentary society tended to act out their hostility in one-on-one confrontations or in small raids, as is the habit of contemporary hunter-gatherers (Dickson 1990:166).

/./NEOLITHIC WARFARE

Knaupft (1990) reports that foragers typically have an ethos stressing non-competitive approaches to inter-personal and inter-group relations and a low frequency of social aggression and a low valuation of aggressive behavior. Violence tends to increase with the development of a surplus of food that can be stored, in granaries for agriculturalists or in herds for pastoralists. This becomes what I term a storable-stealable-surplus and necessitates centralized control, militarization and leads to violence in raids and defensive measures to protect community wealth.

Kelly (2007) notes that violence is more common in non-egalitarian societies than in egalitarian ones. For example, in complex sedentary foragers, violence may be culturally acceptable and may frequently occur between individuals in competition for prestige.

Warfare “has its root in the demographic and economic changes of the Neolithic Revolution” (Haas 2001:329). No doubt with the need to store and control early storage bins of grain and other food crops early politicos would have organized locals to defend them, most likely on a volunteer basis i.e., there were, as yet, no standing armies. Yet as early as ancient Sumer (ca. 7,300 YBP) there were armies composed of full-time soldiers who did not disband during times of peace. With the passage of time these professional soldiers became better trained and equipped than army reserves and volunteers.

Grain storage was at the heart of this military buildup. During Sumer’s Ubaid 1 period (ca. 7,300–6,700 YBP), in the extreme southern portion of present-day Iraq, on what was then the shores of the Persian Gulf, people began to experiment with grain production. Settlers established permanent colonies there pioneering the growing of grains in arid conditions. Their success led to what I call a storable-stealable-surplus. Once the Sumerians had permanent settlements and stores of grain, they had a problem that would face almost all farmers who developed beyond subsistence farming. That was the fact that while they had grain there were others who did not. Their precious stores of grain were “stealable.” As such they needed protection and a standing army was one common response in a society that had developed a complex division of labor.

Armies grew out of the same collective efforts that went into the digging of irrigation canals to succor the crops of these early Sumerian planters. It was another form of centralized coordination of labor.

We know that a central government had arisen in Ubaid Sumer because their large villages had the first temples of public architecture in Mesopotamia. Their settlements show lower-ranked houses surrounding a temple-government complex of higher-ranked houses, indicating the emergence of social stratification. Ranked grave goods also show signs of an hierarchical society, indicators of decreasing egalitarianism. Peter Bogucki (1990) calls this transition as the “trans-egalitarian” period wherein households competed for resources with some winners and some losers. In other words, this became a time of social mobility, both upward and downward. This was the nascent rise of an élite class of hereditary chiefs. Perhaps they were kin group headmen who were linked to the administration of the temple, its shrines and granaries. Stored grain not only fell under military protection but also that of the shamans and priests. Heads of state were responsible for mediating conflicts within the community and also protecting it from attacks by outsiders.

Thorkild Jacobsen (1978) and other Sumerian scholars believe that this culture saw for the first time the rise of a ranked society with rural peasants and lower stratum townsmen being lorded over by a centralized élite cadre residing in the temple complex of the town. The rise of this aristocratic group of politico-religious leaders was stimulated, among other things, by the central need to protect society’s stores of food – the storable-stealable-surplus on which their existence depended.

Roper (1975) indicates that war increased with the growth of trade and efforts to control strategic sites along trade routes. Another important factor in the development of warfare was the evolution of centralized governments and hierarchy (Kelly 2000:1-2). In the long Paleolithic such conditions only existed in the few sedentary foragers, late developments and isolated cases, but after the Agricultural Revolution they became widespread i.e., the coveting of land, the need to defend stores and compact villages and the emergence of long distance trade routes that had to be defended.

There is another aspect of war in the Neolithic, one which involves how farmers interacted with foragers. Some believe that as farmers were forced to migrate by demographic pressure, they encountered foragers and the meeting was not peaceful (Keeley 1996). Evidence for this comes from mass graves, arrows embedded in skeletons and village defensive systems of farmers who established themselves in Europe. It appears that there was violent conquest initially and ongoing attacks by non-farmers, either foragers or pastoralists. In any case, the emergence of agriculture likely stimulated warfare because farmers needed land and they used that land to produce a storable surplus, which made them vulnerable to attacks by have-nots.

Thus, in this perspective, I am saying that warfare became widespread in the Neolithic as aggrandizers tried to control more material resources. We have some evidence to support that from late European history. Charles Tilly (1992) has noted that due to low population densities and the concomitant lack of land scarcity in Europe prior to the 15th century, there was relatively little warfare. However, beginning in Italy and spreading through Europe aggressive states began to be formulated and there was “continuous aggressive competition for trade and territory among changing states of unequal size, which made war a driving force in European history” (1992:54). Once land scarcity became a reality, politicos militarized their states further and aggressively tried to expand their size. This expansion was, in part, about the expanding need for land, but also about controlling new populations as tax sources and as a pool for military recruits. As states expanded their military efforts and took territory far from the center of authority, they were faced with having to defend such new lands and therefore had to further expand their militarism.

Fortifying distant provinces became a military necessity and a lynchpin of state security. According to Frederick the Great (1712-1786), King of Prussia, frontier fortifications were the “mighty nails which hold the ruler’s provinces together” (quoted in: Herz 1957:477). Success in war also meant the expansion of state functionaries who would benefit from becoming provincial governors and military staff in remote forts. They had a vested interest in expanding war and the resulting fortifications. Lord Robert Cecil (1830-1903), a.k.a. Lord Salisbury, who was involved in British expansion of empire, and who faced the problems of dealing with far-flung territories, was known to have said in exasperation that if his military advisors had their way they would fortify the moon to prevent an attack from Mars (Howard 1991:23). Once set in motion by the desire for more power, prestige and property, warfare was a self-fueling firestorm.

/./THE CONQUEST & TRIBUTE PATTERN

Once there were communities with stored wealth, warfare, both defensive and offensive, became a part of the human existence. Politicos found it convenient as a means of shoring up their power to militarize their societies with an eye toward defending their communities against attackers. On the other hand, some use their military forces to attack those communities they felt to be vulnerable. There were roughly two goals in such offensive war: (1) the attackers could sack and burn, taking wealth and slaves; or, (2) they could subjugate the members of the losing community to demand tribute or periodic payments to the conquering leadership. Both strategies have been employed since the advent of military forces concomitant with the development of a storable, stealable surplus.

The latter approach was usually consistent with expansive chiefdoms, as in the case of the complex Amerindian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States. By the time of European contact, the area’s political centers were linked in alliance, tributary or conquest relationships (Anderson 1994:74). Arriving Europeans found clusters of communities clustered around distinctive political centers, the smaller communities being subservient to the powerful center.

For example, the Coosa or Cofitachequi had two administrative/decision-making levels consisting of primary chiefs and their immediate followers and lesser tribute-paying chiefs and their retinues (see image of the Coosa Chief below). Hernando DeSoto found a three-level settlement ranking system consisting of a major ceremonial/political center surrounded by smaller tribute-paying centers, which in turn were surrounded by tribute-paying villages (Anderson 1994:75). This hierarchical form was also noted by the Pardo Expedition (1566) where élites were seen as having distinctive dress and they were ranked into big chiefs and lesser nobles, the latter supporting the big chief, who in some accounts was called the Great Sun. Decisions were made by a chief in consultation with his Privy Council or principal supporters, comprised of men with inherited positions and also others who had distinguished themselves in warfare.



The Great Sun lived in the center of town, with the dwellings of his nobles arrayed around him, symbolic of central and peripheral authority. This is a common pattern in history (Smout 1980) that has been replicated over the centuries because, having established power, aspiring men strove to shore it up with aggressive war and its spoils. The Great Sun’s residence was set apart from the homes of commoners and served as his abode, but also as a temple, combination house and council room. These were mound-builders and the chief’s complex was often raised on one.

Not only were élite Coosa distinguished from commoners by dress and settlement pattern, they also acted in the service of the Great Sun as warriors, litter bearers, those who would fan him in public appearances, etc. In this openly visible service, nobles demonstrated both their close proximity to central authority and their dependence on it.

The center was about the business of siphoning off wealth from the periphery and it was paid in both foodstuffs and luxury goods – maize, deerskins, martin skins, bark blankets, feather mantles, trousers, leggings, moccasins, etc. – which were stored in large quantity near the residence of the Great Sun. He also had corncribs throughout his chiefdom filled with maize that was available to him upon demand.

This chiefly complex in the middle of town was a redistribution center. Maize stores could be distributed to anyone in need, indeed Spanish armies were supplied with large quantities of food from them, and the Great Sun would also distribute luxury goods and slaves captured in war to his loyal followers. Of course, this was a method of maintaining the support of the key members of society.

The chief was also set apart in death with elaborate mortuary ceremonies, his body laid to rest in specially constructed tombs, also (and symbolically surrounded in death by the noble dead. At these sites elaborate mortuary rites and ancestor veneration were performed. These tombs, as well as temples, shrines and sacred relics were overseen by an organized priesthood and defended, as were other chiefly properties, by a warrior cult. These sacred sites were the “ideological centers of individual polities” (Anderson 1994:80). When warfare broke out, one focus of aggressors was the destruction of an enemy’s sacred places, thought to be especially demoralizing to a people the aggressors wished to conquer.

It was then an object of warfare to devour a people, disrespect their sacred places and ancestors and bring them into slavery or to their knees as suppliers of tribute. The chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States were is a more or less constant state of war and were separated by buffer zones as a means of warding off attacks. Towns were also fortified and warriors were kept at the ready to defend the stores of the chief. When the Spaniards arrived they were repeatedly facing well organized military units who practiced by hit-and-hide tactics and larger-scale campaigns. Warfare and the pursuit of power and tribute had become a way of life by the time of European arrival.

/./THE FABRICATION OF WARFARE BY AGGRANDIZERS

It is my contention that once a surplus generates stratification in a society, whether a sedentary foraging, agricultural or pastoralist society, aggrandizers will fabricate rules and ideas that favor militarism. Earlier non-sedentary foragers of the long Paleolithic may have been violent and may have from time to time retaliated against a neighboring band, but violence was limited to ad hoc conflicts, murder or capital punishment. As Kelly states:

The transition from capital punishment to feud or war – that is, the transition that encapsulates the origin of war – is thus contingent upon the development of the companion concepts of injury to the group and group liability that provides grounds for generalized, reciprocating collective violence that takes the form of raid and counter-raid (2000:43).

It is when a society finds itself in the presence of strategic economic stimuli (e.g., land, fishing holes, etc) that aggrandizers formulate ways of arming their fellows to, perhaps in the first instance, defend theirs; and then to move from defensive warfare to offensive combat. Strategic economic stimuli create surplus wealth and this stimulates the desire on the part of aggrandizers to formulate rules and roles, political and religious, the give them the power to control their surplus and to go after the surplus of others. This is usually done by politicos, but they also may act in concert with religious leaders or priests, as we see in the case of the Yakut-Mono Amerindians of California, where little chiefs and shamans collaborated to extract surplus value from their fellow sedentary foragers. This is a diminutive example of what is commonly known to historians as the palace-temple complex e.g., that of Pi-Ramesse of the Pharaoh Ramesses II (3279-3213 YBP) which housed within its walls royal palaces, the high court, military barracks and temples, all the architecture of power. Also, there was a giant statue of the enthroned Pharaoh and wall painting depicting victories in war (Tyldesley 2000).

Fabrications took the form of words, ideas, rules, roles, but also architecture and art, all designed to establish and confirm the right to rule i.e., the authority of the fabricators e.g., kings, priests and members of the royal entourage.

Since we have seen this tendency to claim authority and rights over the surplus (e.g., through taxes and tithes) in sedentary foragers with a surplus, agriculturalists and modern day states (e.g., Zimbabwe under Mugabe – though the legitimacy of his thievery is questionable) we must conclude that self-aggrandizement of this sort is connected to the presence of limited strategic resources, a generated storable surplus and political offices in an hierarchical structure. It was not present among non-sedentary foragers throughout the millions of years prior to the advent of widespread farming and still is not in existence in modern day non-sedentary foragers.

/./THE NORTHWEST COAST POTLATCH AS COMPETITION

Paleolithic foragers who were not sedentary foragers were egalitarian and largely non-competitive in terms of wealth or social status. That was not true of sedentary foragers, such as the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast in America.



[click on map to enlarge]

They had developed an institution known as the potlatch. This was a highly competitive public event. Before the Europeans arrived, potlatch consumable gifts included storable food e.g., dried fish, fish oil, canoes and, for the very wealthy, slaves. They did not give away income-generating assets e.g., land or resource rights. In other words, the used the “interest” to compete by showing off, but didn’t touch the “principal.” Big givers received big prestige. That was the point, to elevate your social standing in the eyes of the on-looking community by giving away, or in some cases, destroying what was considered desirable consumer goods.

Marvin Harris (1974) claimed that the potlatch was simply a leveling mechanism, distributing goods from haves to have-nots or have-less individuals and families. In contrast to this functionalist explanation, Boone (1998) uses the Handicap Principle (see Amotz Zahavi & Avishag Zahavi (1997) to explain it in biogenic terms. The Handicap Principle initially was used to explain such things as the intricately attractive plumage of peacocks. The plumage is seen as an “honest signal” suggesting that the male peacock is of high quality and thus desirable as a mate. Only healthy peacocks are able to grow such attractors e.g., a long tail because it takes a great deal of energy to do so. The Zahavis also indicate that animals may seek prestige by making available resources to others. This is seen as indicating too that they are of high quality.

James Boone uses this principle to explain why a high ranked chief gives away his property and may even burn down his house. He is deemed to be involved in a form of “costly signaling” or “costly display,” not unlike the peacock. The human show-off is signaling to other chiefs and high-ranked individuals that he is so rich that the things he is giving away or destroying are things of no consequence to him and that he can easily recover from their loss.

To my mind, neither of these is a true explanation of causation, but rather strands in the more likely complex set of forces that led the Northwest Coast peoples to develop the institution of the potlatch. My interest is not in initial causation, but rather to ask: why is it that such a competitive form emerges in a hunter-gatherer-fisher society when most such societies are egalitarian? The answer is that their material world stimulated aggrandizers to develop rules of ownership and inheritance that led to the massive accumulation of wealth and power by those fortunate enough to have key resource-access points allowing them to store larger quantities of dried fish, which enabled them to move up the hierarchical ladder to become chiefs and leaders of wealthy families.

/./THE CALUSA AMERINDIAN CASE: A NON-AGRICULTURAL CHIEFDOM

The Calusa inhabited the Southwest coast of Florida from the Charlotte Harbor area southwards. Their territory contained twenty-three towns at the time of contact inhabited by descendants of Paleo-Indians who inhabited Southwest Florida approximately 12,000 years ago. In Southwest Florida they were neighbors with other Amerindian tribes, including the Tekesta, Ais, Jeaga and the Tamahita (Swanson 1922:11). Their enemies to the north were the Tocobaga.


THE CALUSA'S TERRITORY:RED=MAIN REGION; BLUE=THEIR POLITICAL HEGEMONY

From approximately the 1500's to their demise in the early 1800's, the Calusa used seashells as architectural foundations for their towns. The remnants of their cities can be seen today on several small islands off the coast of Southwest Florida. One such island is called Mound Key, which is believed to have been the Calusa's military stronghold as well as their ceremonial center. The 125-acre island sits deep in Estero Bay and is open to visitors. This Key or Caye is completely artificial, being built by the Calusa with shells from the sea bottom. Such industry is an indicant of a highly organized society. The remains of another shell mound are located on Connecticut Street on Fort Myers Beach.

These Amerindians also dug canals for their dugout canoes, their main transportation and which they sometimes rigged together to create a catamaran (Brown, R. C. nd:4). This also shows for this non-agricultural people great enterprise and organization. The canoes were used for transport and fishing. Their fishing industry was advanced in that they used large nets, which must have brought in large catches in the Southwest Floridian waters that were rich in marine life. Archaeologists have found indicators of such fishing and large quantities of mollusk and fish remains. The Calusa also fished with lines and harpoons (Brown, R. C. nd:5). Archeologists have also uncovered numerous ceremonial mounds, temples and burial sites, indicative of an advanced politico-ritual complex.

The Calusa utilized shells as tools, construction bricks, weapons, art and jewelry. They also used them for anvils, scrapers, weights for fishing nets, awls, choppers, pendants, necklaces and knives. Also, archeologists have unearthed many wooden carvings and masks. Other animal head carvings were found as well including wolves, pelicans, alligators, panthers, deer and sea turtles.

The Calusa were a non-agricultural people who ate primarily fish, shellfish, with supplements of land fauna e.g., deer, raccoon, reptiles and avifauna (Widmer 1988:5). The Calusa were organized into a chiefdom, with a paramount chief who received tribute from lesser chiefs and village headmen. He maintained political alliances through strategic marriages, even with the marriage of his sister to the Spanish military overlord (Adelantado) in Florida, Pedro Menéndez De Avilés in 1566 and it was a marriage that was, in essence, forced on the Spaniard by Calos (a.k.a. Carlos), the paramount chief of the Calusa (Reilly 1981:395).


Pedro Menéndez De Avilés

The Calusa élite cadre also included a chief priest, a capitán general and a second capitán position beneath him. There was also a noble class. Widmer (1988:5-6) notes that: “The paramount chief was clearly differentiated from the rest of the populace in terms of sumptuary display. He had a forehead ornament of gold, beaded leg bands and a wooden bench or stool, which represented his title to office.” Additionally, lesser officers and commoners had to greet the chief in a special manner and he was the holder of secret religious knowledge. When the chief or his principal wife died, sons and daughters of commoners were sacrificed to their gods. Members of the ruling élite married their sisters endogamously.

A Spanish missionary, Fr. Juan Rogel, who was stationed in the Calusa capital, Calos, wrote that the Calusa had a tripartite ranked set of deities. The highest god governed natural phenomenon e.g., the movements of stars and weather. These were maritime peoples. The next deity presided over political matters e.g., the government. The least important deity pertained to warfare, as the Calusa were very warlike. They were at war with neighbors at the time of the arrival of the Spanish and even sent over eighty war canoes against the Spanish galleon that anchored off their shores. Locally the Calusa were known as the “fierce people” or "Calos" in their language.

One of the gods required sacrifices of human eyes. These sacrifices took place atop temple mounds, with their heads being carried in a masked ritual dance and procession down from the temple mound and through the people.

The Calusa are an example of a sedentary forager society, living exclusively off of nature’s bounty in the lush region of Southwest Florida. This was a tropical, coastal estuarine zone that had unusually high quality and abundant food resources – high both in fat and protein (Widmer 1988:8). More than 50 years ago, George Peter Murdock (1968:15) noticed in his cross-cultural data that the stability and abundance of marine resources in some regions led to the development of sedentary habitation and a greater degree of cultural complexity than is typical of hunter-gatherers.

Also, adjacent to this marine zone was a terrestrial area with a long photoperiod, which favored the growth of plant resources that could easily be harvested. Marine products were traded with that area in return for plant foodstuffs.

For this maritime chiefdom, the main food source was fish, but not anadromous fish, which live in the sea and make, runs up rivers to spawn; but pseudocatadromous fish, which spend their entire lives in the local estuaries, only going to sea to breed. As such, these fish were available most of the year and just prior to migrating to sea were easily harvested as they formed massive schools in the estuarial zone.

I am concerned to understand why inequality arose in the two classic sedentary foragers, the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast and the Calusa of Southwest Florida. Both lacked agriculture or herds of domesticated animals, yet both developed chiefship and extreme stratification. Again, how did these sedentary foragers differ from mobile ones?

Let's look more closely at the Calusa data to answer these questions. Anthropologists know that the small size of competing kin units reduces the chance that strong overarching political hegemonies will arise. In a lineage-based society with a low population density leadership usually is based on age and experience and is minimally developed. Therefore, chiefdoms of an overarching nature seldom arise unless there are other organizational features that require coordinated actions. Chiefdoms usually require a large population and the resources to support it. It is now clear to anthropologists that scattered, isolated or mobile populations do not usually have the type of economy that produces hierarchy and complexity.

Both the Northwest Coast Amerindians and the Calusa of Florida did. The causal variable was not economic, but rather demographic. Only sedentary settlement seems to produce fertility rates that maintain and give rise to large growing populations (Widmer 1988:261).

Of course, this cannot occur without a lush environment i.e., an adequate carrying capacity. Both agriculture and fishing adaptations have a higher critical carrying capacity than the hunter-gatherer mode of production of mobile, non-storers. Thus, complexity and inequality are more likely to emerge in sedentary foragers than in mobile ones.

The ecomass was, therefore, crucial in providing a base upon which complex polities were built in both the Northwest Coast case and in Southwest Florida. Pianka (1974:206) says that there are essentially two types of environments – fine-grained and patchy. Fine-grained environments have evenly spaced food resources, while patchy ones are characterized by heterogeneous, dispersed food resources.

Both the Northwest Coast Amerindians and the Calusa had fine-grained ecosystems, which allowed sedentary harvesting of resources. The behavioral response to a lush environment of the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast and the Calusa of Florida led to sedentarism because of the opportunity to efficiently exploit resources of a wide variety in a fixed area. When resources are stable and available from year to year, foragers are able to establish permanent settlements. Permanence leads settlers to be able to extract the maximal amount of energy per unit of energy expended in capturing their food. Movement would add to the cost of capture. Settling down would also make for better marriage arrangements and for more efficient defense. Thus, sedentary settlement is energetically efficient and has social benefits.

However, establishing permanent dwellings in an ecosystem, however lush it is, creates other problems, ones that require coordinated activities and leadership. In both the Northwest Coast and Southwest Florida cases, settlement of foragers in such ecosystems led to the development of a ranked sociopolitical system.

In the Florida case, the inshore fishing grounds were the most critical economic variable. They had fixed locations and were ranked in value because their production varied. These fishing grounds were the functional equivalent of fixed farms in agricultural societies and of the key points of fish harvest along the Northwest Coast. As with many farms in the Neolithic, and the major fishing spots in the Pacific Northwest Coast, the fishing sites of the Calusa were corporately owned and managed by kin groups with a paramount chief eventually arising to supervise the production and distribution of marine products (Widmer 1988:263).

It is probable that the first settlers took the best fishing spots and less productive ones fell to latecomers. This would have led to differential productivity and success. Some families would have got rich, while others would have had to struggle.

This differential energy capture, resulting in wealth differences, would have had the effect of creating conflict between the haves and have-nots and would have lent itself to the rise of coordinators, which in the case of both the Northwest Coast Amerindians and the Calusa of Florida were chiefs (see Netting 1972 on these processes). In both cases, chiefs tended to come from the largest lineages, as they would have a military edge over less successful and less populated kin groups. Continuous, high social tension levels and resulting conflicts would have acted as an “autocatylitc devise” (Adams 1978:303-304), which likely resulted in the Florida case in a transition from a situation where family headmen ruled their kin to a continuous, hierarchically centralized authority system with inherited positions of leadership i.e., a chiefdom.

The Pacific Northwest Coast and the Calusa of Southwest Florida are similar situations, both having the ability to store, but there was a major difference. In the Florida case, fishing grounds were not the only environmental resource that was not evenly distributed and equally available to settlers. Water was another. The immediate coastal waters were largely brackish and saline. Springs were few and far between. The Calusa did not have large stores of food, as in the Northwest Coast case, but they did need to construct cisterns to store and protect water, just as the Amerindians of the Pacific Northwest Coast would have had to construct and protect their storehouses of dried fish.

Anthropologists note that large-scale constructions require coordination and political leadership to supervise their construction and maintenance (Earle 1977). In the Calusa case, artificial cisterns were constructed on many of the larger settlement sites for the purpose of capturing rainwater (Cushing 1896:336). This was a critical form of storage for the Calusa. These artificial ponds, when built, “acted as nucleating features, encouraging sedentary settlement” (Widmer 1988:264). They did not store marine products for long in the tropical climate.

The Calusa were fishers that utilized key spots where the estuarial fish congregated. Those families with prime spots, presumably owned, to fish would have been far more successful than lineages with less desirable fishing holes. They would have been able to fabricate more nets, canoes and fishing gear and would have had greater say in social control and management of resources in the community. Thus, as Firth (1966:100-101) found for the Malay fishers of Kelantan, centralization arises when one or more strong families take control of fishing gear and labor and this control leads to wider political control. Lineage elders who could solve seasonal and stochastic fluctuations in fish availability due to seasonal fluctuations in tidal levels in the estuaries and the vagaries of weather would have had great political clout in the fishing community. Heavy rains would sometimes flood the estuaries and hurricanes and other natural events would, from time to time, create crises in the fishing community. Leadership would have arisen to deal with such issues.

The chiefship system that arose in the Calusa region was that of a redistributive monarchy, the paramount chief of which would dole out catches to the various villages of the region. This was the same kind of redistribution system that led to political integration in the Northwest Coast case (see: Piddocke 1965; Suttles 1968). But there was a significant difference in the two cases. The Amerindians of the Northwest Coast could dry and store significant amounts of fish; whereas in the Florida case the Calusa could not. It was not possible for them to store fish for any length of time in the tropics and also, and more importantly, it was not possible to accumulate the mass quantities to permit it. The Calusa could not catch massive amounts of fish, as could the Northwest Coast Amerindians in the annual salmon runs. The Calusa only had daily catches that could be immediately consumed and distributed in a widespread form of social banking. Thus, there was a recurring need for redistribution of fish on a daily basis. Widmer 1988:269) says: “A continuous, daily reallocation of fish production has strong feedback effects for the development and reinforcement of a centralized polity and probably was the crucial factor in the Calusa adaptation.” The daily reallocation of food became a cultural means to deal with environmental perturbations and was strongly correlated with chiefdom-level social formations (Peebles & Kus 1977).

These occasional troubles in production could be solved through proper planning and coordinating resource allocation. All this would have also necessitated a system for dispute settlement over the use of corporate fishing territories and for the implementation of fishing techniques and gear for maximum output.

Anthropologists have shown that chiefs have an important and continuous role in maintaining success in exploiting fixed resources they control and in correcting for the spatial deficiencies in production on a daily basis (see Adams 1978). Such political dominance was attained by those kin units that inhabited favorable spots and which came to have greater net growth and consequently controlled more food and caloric energy.

Finally, warfare was endemic to the Calusa and was controlled and directed by the paramount chief. Their economy operated in a limited, highly circumscribed, fixed resource base. Therefore, when fission of kin-economic groups reached a maximum holding capacity, an option was to war against neighbors to expand their resource base. Since other chiefdoms in Florida were also trying to do this, the Calusa chief also had to defend his homeland against attacks from enemies, primarily the Tocobaga to the north.

/./WHAT CAUSES THE RISE OF STRATIFICATION?

Stratification is hierarchy with the capacity for a differential distribution of resources. Barrington Moore Jr. (1966:470-471) makes a number of points relevant to a discussion of stratification:

(1) Folk concepts are grounded in reality i.e., aggrandizers know the environment and produce concepts that allow them access to prestige, power and property.

(2) The principal factor in exploitation as an objective condition is the ratio between the services rendered by élites and the amount of surplus value of labor taken by them from the lower stratum.

(3) The balance between contributions from each stratus can be measured, albeit imprecisely in the case of qualitative variables. Gross irregularities, flow direction of value and significant changes can be readily detected.

(4) The contributions of the upper class, to be significant, must be necessary to the society and obvious to the lower stratum.

A similar approach to stratification is to be found in the classic article by Davis & Moore (1945). Their basic position is that unequal rewards accrue to people in society who have the talent to achieve high office. I am less inclined than such functionalists to see all the contributions of the upper stratum as serving society, for there is a great deal of spin doctoring, propaganda, ritualized behavior and sacralizing of élite activities that interferes with and muddies up the functional argument. In history, individuals achieved high office and powerful positions in society by a variety of means, not all of them based on talent e.g., the effete son of a king who succeeds to the throne upon the death of his father.

What causes the rise of stratification, especially if for most of human existence on this earth was not a social reality. This is the key question I am attempting to address in this work. My answer is a materialist one based on the interaction of the natural tendency for any population of humans to have approximately ten percent of its numbers as aggrandizers, go-getters or seekers who, for reasons of biology and personality, are driven to achieve.

Given this biomass base, stratification and warfare do not occur until there is something strategic to fight over. This is ultimately attributable to the economic transformation that came about in the few sedentary forager societies in the long Paleolithic and later, more dramatically, with the advent of farming, herding and long distance trade. We can think of strategic sites (land, fishing spots and trade routes, for example) as stimuli to the natural assertiveness of the aggrandizers in those populations. Once they saw the opportunities that strategic sites provided, they acted to secure them for themselves and their close friends and relatives.

When a surplus is not available, as it was not for most of the long Paleolithic for most bands of foraging humans, those aggressive drives inherent in the few aggrandizers were stymied for the most part, at least in terms of aggrandizers building cross-generational institutions of wealth and power. Once what I call a storable-stealable-surplus was mad possible by material circumstances, aggrandizers automatically made the necessary moves to secure advantages for themselves and their own family and cohorts.

This was true for Nookta or Kwakiutl aggrandizers along the Northwest Coast of North America and it is true today. Those Amerindian aggrandizers grasped opportunities to secure good fishing points where salmon could easily be netted and turned their material fortune into positions of power and from those vantage points created rules and ideas that transformed their egalitarian society into a stratified one with them at the top.

In the modern context, let's look at the case of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Initially a left-leaning freedom fighter opposing the racist, capitalist regime of Ian Smith in the white-controlled state of Southern Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then called, Mugabe moved up the ranks of Smith’s opponents to become the Head of State after Smith’s regime was defeated in a war of independence. While his rhetoric was in line with the values of Mao and Lenin, he seized opportunities that statehood presented and, along with a tight-knit cadre of fellow aggrandizers, gained control of the reigns of political power and the economy. In so doing he and his fellow exploiters were able to bring a thriving nation to its knees in a matters of a few years, but in the process he and his go-getter cronies became fabulously wealthy and have, to this writing, been able to hold onto power and the siphoning hoses they use to suck the life out of Zimbabwe’s economy.

Mugabe is now seen by world leaders as a pariah that has bankrupted a once vibrant national economy, attributing the downward spiral of the economy to his political party’s mismanagement and corruption and the eviction of more that four thousand white farmers in the controversial land redistribution of 2000.

The point is that both the cases of the Northwest Coast Amerindians and the freedom fighters of Rhodesia highlight what causes stratification. The former occurred in a previously egalitarian society, wherein roaming hunter-gatherers stumbled on a lush econiche and created a stratified society; and the latter wherein aggrandizers in the independence movement seized the opportunity to push aside those with true socialist values to create an abomination of exploitation and greed.

My interest is in why and how egalitarian hunter-gatherers made the transition to sedentary foragers with stratified structures and how this stratification was extended and enhanced with the emergence of the domestication of plants and animals. Why wasn't stratification fabricated in the long Paleolithic, except in a few cases? We know that it was developed in lush environments where sedentary foraging became the dominant mode of production. We know that this was extended in the Neolithic and spread all over the earth. We know that aggrandizing men fabricated poleconomic rules almost everywhere, albeit to varying degrees, in order to accumulated wealth and power. Why didn’t such fabrication occur in a major way in all those centuries prior to the Agricultural Revolution, except in rare instances?

Foraging societies often display intensive sharing and cooperation because these are behaviors that best promote the interests of individuals “within the configuration of hunter-gatherer technoeconomic systems and natural environments” (Sanderson nd: 37). In other words, there was no small cadre of élites promoting inequality for their own benefit; rather members of the band rigorously promoted equality because that offered them the best chance of survival within the context of their ecomass and given the need to be constantly vigilant against the biologically driven desire for esteem through achievement of high status. To Sanderson this is biomaterialist and ecomaterialist explanation.

But there is another level of explanation: polimaterialist. This type of explanation indicates that social forms also come into being because of the political interests or situations of the participants. These power interests ordinarily spring from the actors’ economic interests, which in turn are ultimately derived from the character of the human biogram and the ecogram. In my terminology they are poleconomic interests and, from a sociological point of view, they are the most important variables in the building of inequality in societies.

/./THE THEORETICAL IMPORTANCE OF STORAGE

Many hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic went for periods without certain kinds of food that under modern conditions could be stored e.g., meat. This is true even today in certain parts of the world where hunter-gatherers still consider Nature a larder and take their food from Nature’s storage places as they need them. This is all well and good for fruit, roots, nuts and berries, but Nature also stores calories in animals that are not so easily brought to the dinner table. Consequently, when hunters today in foraging societies are able to bring down a large animal they often gorge themselves with meat, since it cannot safely be kept for any significant length of time. Baegert (1863-1864) reported that early Amerindians of California were known to eat 24 pounds of meat in a 24-hour period. The anthropologist Allan Holmberg personally saw Siriono Amerindians of Eastern Bolivia eat 30 pounds of meat in a day (1950:36). Some bands like the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa dry some meat after gorging themselves, but long-term storage was not a main factor in their economy (Marshall 1965:255).

This is an important point because non-storers did not develop inequality and storers did. In other words, once storage of foodstuffs was possible, some in society began to move to control it and to accumulate more stored goods than others. This was the beginning of inequality and the foundations of a stratified society. Without an economic surplus, men cannot easily control food, since they are only free to monopolize that portion of a groups food that is not consumed and in non-foraging societies that surplus, if one can call it that, exists only in Nature i.e., the food still available to be picked, dug or killed. It is there to be collected, but any individual in a non-storer hunting and gathering society would be foolish to collect and store it for it is already stored in Nature and is there for the having.

For example, the environment of the Ju/’hoansi is abundant with foods. By far the most abundant and important of these foodstuffs is the Mongongo nut. Lee (1968:33) notes that tens of thousands of pounds of these nuts are eaten by the Ju/’hoansi each year, yet thousands more rot on the ground. These nuts count for 50 percent of their vegetable diet by weight, but they cannot eat them all.

When Richard Lee asked a Ju/’hoansi man why his people didn’t harvest and store Mongongo nuts, one of the staples of the bands in the Kalahari Desert, the man was perplexed, replying that they were already stored for the having in nature. He went on to emphasize that re-storing them would be stupid, superfluous work. When the Ju/’hoansi need the nuts, they simply walk through Nature and pick them. This natural abundance, as opposed to stored food, prevents a person, however much the individual is a naturally born aggrandizer, from gaining an unequal edge on others by amassing wealth.

This is not to say that the Paleolithic people who lacked visible storage technology did not store, in the sense that they left certain foods in nature’s larder to access later (Ingold 1983). But to say that hunter-gatherers left some foods in nature to be picked at will is very different from storing grains in granaries or calories in herds of animals. Why? Because the former cannot be stolen and hoarded elsewhere by thieves and the latter is a storable, stealable surplus, which automatically presents the need for complex organizations to defend the surplus, as well as military excursions to take the surplus of others, should leaders decide to turn their defensive armies into offensive ones.



/./A COMPARISON OF SIMPLE NON-STORING FORAGERS WITH COMPLEX STORING FORAGERS

From the archeological record, we know that non-sedentary foragers made and exchanged gifts, an exchange that surely included some element of competition i.e., trying to give more or better gifts than one received, but the sedentary foragers took this to the extreme because they lived in a very lush environment that provided them with a storable form of foodstuffs that, in its stored form, was considered disposable wealth. In essence, to borrow Michael W. Young’s phrase, the Northwest Coast Amerindians were “fighting with food,” though as time passed and they encountered European trade goods they added them into their weaponry.

Transient foragers in the Paleolithic did not “fight with food” or with much of anything else, for that matter. Most lived more or less peacefully with each other within the band and with outsiders they developed cooperative means of exchange and aid. All that was to change with sedentary foragers and even more dramatically with the development of large-scale food production in the Neolithic. There we get not only peaceful “food fights” such as the potlatch, but we witness the rise of both defensive and offensive weaponry and military tactics, as well as walled cities, moats and all sorts of battlements. Yet in both cases the causal variable was the same: the presence of a food surplus.

Kelly (2007:294) gives us a comparison of simple foragers vs. complex ones:

SIMPLE VS. COMPLEX

Environment: Unpredictable or variable; Highly predictable or less variable

Diet: Terrestrial game [I would add: plants]; Marine or plant foods

Settlement size: Small; Large

Residential mobility: Medium to high; Low to none

Demography: Low population density relative to food; High population density relative to food

Food storage: Little to no dependence; Medium to high dependence

Social organization: No corporate groups; corporate descent groups (lineages)

Political organization: Egalitarian; Hierarchal: classes based on wealth or descent

Occupational specialization: Only for older persons; Common

Territoriality: Social-boundary defense; Perimeter defense

Warfare: Rare; Common

Slavery: Absent; Frequent

Ethic of competition: Not tolerated; Encouraged

Resource ownership: Diffuse; Tightly controlled

Exchange: Generalized reciprocity; Wealth objects, competitive feasts

To this list I would add: Leadership: Ad hoc; Permanent & hereditary

Generally speaking, experts feel that the causal variables behind the rise of complexity among sedentary foragers are a combination of resource abundance, population pressure, intensification of production and storage and the expropriation of labor.


/./THE SEDENTARY FORAGERS: THE CHUMASH OF CALIFORNIA

The Chumash were Paleolithic Amerindians who lived in the Santa Barbara Channel area of California (Arnold 1992), which was and is one of the most productive fisheries in the world. The area was blessed with mild weather and abundant game and edible plant life, especially acorn-producing oak trees. Prior to contact, they lived there from approximately 8 thousand YBP. Significant contact with Europeans came in 1542 in the visit to Southern California by João Rodrigues Cabrilho (d. 1543), a Portuguese explorer explored the west coast of North America while sailing for Spain (Gamble 2008:7). In fact, Cabrilho died from injuries in a skirmish with the Amerindians of the islands off the Southern California coast. The most significant contact, however, came two centuries later in the Portolá overland expedition in 1769, which led to Spanish settlement in that region of California.

The Chumash lived in a lush environment and practiced hunting, foraging and fishing, what Ristvet (2007:62) calls “advanced hunting and gathering techniques.” They lived on fish, shellfish, sea mammals and their main stored item was acorns, also they also smoked fish and deer meat. As a source of wealth, acorns could be stored for several years.

These Amerindians went to sea in rather sophisticated, relative to most other California Amerindian tribes, sewn-plank canoes (Kroeber 1971 [1951]:3).


A CHUMASH SEWN-PLANK CANOE

The building of such elaborate sea-going vessels took time, money and the control of labor. Notice the intricacy of construction in this image:


INTRICATE SEWING OF PLANKS ON CHUMASH OCEAN-GOING CANOES

As they mastered the art of building plank canoes they were able to venture into the ocean, going from the mainland to the islands off the California coast and this allowed them to participate in long-distance trade, the main source of chiefly wealth. It also gave them access to marine life of an extraordinary range. Some were able, for example, to catch 600 pound swordfish and return with their catch safely (Gamble 2008:2).



Their plank boats were, however, very expensive to build and maintain so ownership gave a man an advantage in fishing and trade and this eventually led to marked differences in wealth, social stratification and the rise of chieftaincies of a regional nature. Restricted ownership of this vital means of production, rather than storage of foodstuffs per se was the stimulus to the rise of complexity among the Chumash. Professor Arnold feels that the development of complexity among the Chumash occurred between 1150 and 1300 YBP, that which she calls the Transitional Period (also see: king 1991). Lambert & Walker (1991) believe that warfare played a significant role in the rise of chiefdoms in Southern California coastal groups, as evidenced by traumas to skeletal remains. During this transitional period there were unusual fluctuations in marine temperatures that led to inconsistent foraging returns. This caused subsistence and resource stress, which in turn spurred an increase in the exchange of goods between communities scattered across the area. At this time individuals took the opportunity to fabricate élite roles and corner the management of labor regarding the production and transport of valued goods. These were beads. In combination, these variables and events figured in the rise of political, economic and social complexity. Arnold believes that this complexity occurred rather late between AD 1150 and 1300 (2004) and was connected with élite control of shell bead production, items that became prestige goods, currency and trade goods. In other words, shell bead production was significantly connected to the rise of chiefdoms and played a key role in the development of a regional trade economy (Arnold & Munns 1994).

The Chumash used their surplus, not only to establish trade links, but to hold elaborate ceremonies and to build a highly efficient army, which they utilized for both defensive and offensive purposes (Ristvet 2007:62). Their complexity was as advanced as any farming communities in early California and even more complex than some farming communities in Western Asia. For hunter-gatherer-fishers the Chumash achieved a rather high population density with some of their towns having two thousand residents. At contact it is estimated that they numbered about 20,000. Europeans first encountering the Chumash were amazed at the complexity of their society, which had an apparent hierarchical structure, chiefly “palaces,” a monetized economic system, hereditary leadership, chiefly polygyny, lavish feasts sponsored by chiefs, occupational specialization and large towns that served as political, economic and ritual centers. Chumash chiefs (wots) and nobles had special rights and were demonstrably deferred to in public, as noted by early European visitors to Southern California. While traveling the chief was accompanied by a retinue and no one was allowed to sit in his presence unless he ordered it. From all accounts, the Chumash at the time of contact had an incipient class system based on wealth.

Their political system was village-based, with each having a hereditary chief (Gamble 2008:8), though some chiefs became powerful over several settlements. Since Chumash shell beads have been found as far away as the Great Basin and in the Southwestern U.S., control of long-distance trade networks gave great political power to those who controlled this trade. There is some evidence that chiefs responded to environmental change, a draught on the mainland and a reduction in hunting and gathering there, to develop a canoe-based maritime economy and long-distance trade (Gamble 2008:9). This change may have prompted aggrandizers to seek poleconomic control over labor and develop powerful chieftaincies to control the canoe-based economy. When this happened is an open question for Chumash scholars, with Arnold postulating that it occurred late between 1150 and 1300 YBP, while Chester King (1991) feels that it happened earlier, perhaps as early as 2,600 YBP. For our purposes, it is sufficient to know that the Chumash had duel impetuses to develop complex chiefship: storage and a limited means of production i.e., the plant canoe. Once chiefs had control of the means of production and presumably labor they developed large villages that had control over regional ceremonial, economic and political activities. As Bean & Blackburn (1976) indicate, California Amerindians that had extensive ties with distant communities often held formal and informal trade fairs between communities from different ecological areas, so that goods from mutually advantageous, but politically discrete, areas were exchanged for those of others. These external relations were established and kept vigorous through exchange of goods, but also through inter-marriage between nobles of the respective communities.

As plank canoes were used by élites to move up and down the California coast, as well as to and from the Channel Islands, which allowed them to establish and refresh relations along which flowed staple good, prestige items, marriage partners and knowledge. These expensive canoes gave chiefs and nobles with significant advantages in the Chumash exchange system. The monopoly on sea-going vessels appreciably increased élite poleconomic power and led to sociopolitical integration of an order usually found in hunter-gatherer societies. However, sociopolitical integration took place at several locations and as the different centers vied for power, warfare became the inevitable outcome.

Such an evolution is not uncommon in the history of Neolithic agriculturalists, but remember that these peoples were hunter-gatherer-fishers, not having invented agriculture. Professor Gamble (2008:10) claims that these powerful chiefs actually controlled relations between the mainland and the Channel Islands and even held poleconomic sway over some non-Chumash lands in the interior. He writes: “The production and ownership of canoes were undoubtedly the critical factors in controlling the exchange system between the islands and the mainland.” Presumably, once they were wealthy enough from that trade, they began to dominate other mainland populations. This ownership was a crucial factor is allowing the rich to get richer and more powerful. It took money and power initially to gain control over offshore trade and that money and power then enabled wealthy families to take over governance of mainland communities. Sometimes élites gain power and wealth by controlling land or prime fishing spots, but in this case, in addition to storage of acorns and dried fish, they came to control the key means of production – sewn plank canoes. In all probability that control was based on the wealth accumulated from stored food. Little by little chiefly families must have converted food wealth into wealth derived from trade goods, especially beads, which became a regional currency.

There is a degree of speculation in the previous scenario, which is what archaeologists and anthropologists must do when data from the past are limited, but we have lots of cross-cultural data on élite behavior in similar circumstances and we can extrapolate from such data to the Chumash situation. With storage of foodstuffs in the Northwest Coast, for example, the Amerindians to the north of the Chumash region were able to create an hierarchical society but they lacked the offshore islands with which to trade, so their efforts were put into creating architectural structures, totem poles and potlatching activities; whereas Chumash chiefs and wealthy nobles went a step further, converting wealth and power from storage into the equivalent from trade. Archaeological work on the Chumash does give us more than adequate data on indicators of social stratification e.g., élite housing and elaborate burials, so we know that they Chumash were a ranked society and that chiefs held poleconomic power over wide swaths of Southern California and traded with areas outside that hegemonic zone. In addition to capturing the ownership of the canoes, Chumash élites used another frequent tactic of aggrandizers worldwide, which was to intermarry with other chiefly families from surrounding Chumash communities thereby strengthening their sociopolitical and economic ties in the upper class.

Beads became an important medium of exchange in the far-flung trading system and were an impetus for élites to work to increase their production. These beads were in demand as currency and a means of accumulating and storing wealth, both within the Chumash area and beyond. Once this medium of exchange was in operation, élite aggrandizers were able to exchange beads for food produced in distant regions. Chiefly families and other nobles were members of an exclusive cult, an ‘antap society, a group of religious specialists whose activities had economic functions. Members held periodic feasts at which information and goods were exchanged. In having access to, and control over, bead production, élites had a non-perishable good (bead currency) that was a valuable substitution for perishable food storage. Such secure wealth led to increased social mobility and the rise of an élite class in Chumash territory.

In life, chiefs were distinguished in dress from commoners, wearing fur capes that draped to their ankles and bone pins in their hair. At death, a chief was buried in an elaborate ceremony, being laid to rest with many shell bead necklaces, one of their standard trade items. These beads and other grave goods were buried with the body in a plank canoe. There were also many finely crafted burial goods, many of which have been recovered by archaeologists excavating Chumash cemeteries.

In addition to powerful chiefs, like the Yakut-Mono, the Chumash had shamans, many of whom found their “dream helper” through the taking of the hallucinogen Datura. Being a shaman or “knower of spirits” was an alternative powerful role in Chumash society (Applegate 1975:14). However, some individuals, male and female, took Datura to find a path to success in life in areas other than shamanism e.g., a girl who wished to be rich or marry a chief (Applegate 1975:9). The quest for personal success is rather uncharacteristic of hunter-gatherers, but among the Chumash society was hierarchical and social mobility was not considered a bad thing. Unlike some of the other Amerindian tribes, taking Datura among the Chumash was “all individual rather than collective” according to Applegate (1975:9). Taking the narcotic was a pathway to personal knowledge and was considered a road to success, especially for shamans. It was considered a conduit to the achievement of power. There were also food taboos associated with the taking of the drug as well as fasting and shamans had to abide by these rules more so than commoners. Shamans were seen as powerful, both in a positive and negative sense, since they could also use their knowledge of the spirits and medicines to harm or kill others. Part of the shaman’s power came from his contact with spirits but also each shaman possessed a number of “charmstones” thought to give him supernatural power (Applegate 1975:15). In their search for visions, connection to a spirit helper, informative dreams and the ability to handle the dangerous charmstones, a shaman would fast, observe a variety of taboos and engage in sensory deprivation.

As with the Yakut-Mono, there was a linkage between the power of chiefs and that of shamans in the Chumash world. For example, only chiefs owned the “charmstones,” but shamans could pay the chief to use them (Applegate 1975:15). Researchers think that Chumash rock art found in remote and rugged sites was produced by shamans and was inspired by the use of Datura (Grant 1965), as they were among the Yakut-Mono (Gayton 1948:113).


CHUMASH ROCK ART

/./THE SEDENTARY FORAGERS: SCANDINAVIA

The cold climate and short growing season in Scandinavia meant that farming required a great deal of labor for little reward. Hunter-gatherers dominated the area for a longer period than much of the rest of Europe. In fact, they predominated in Finland until the 16th century.

The first hunter-gatherers moved into Scandinavia and the Baltic States in the early Holocene (began ca. 12 thousand YBP) after the receding glaciers permitted forests to grow in Northern Europe. In the beginning, they kept to the seashores and archaeologists have uncovered huge shell middens. They had fairly permanent villages by the sea in Denmark and Southern Sweden. Fish and marine mammals were their mainstay, however they did move inland to hunt and forage from time to time.

They did trade with early farmers, obtaining cooking vessels and stone axes, which likely functioned as esteemed decorations in the Scandinavian cultural context (Milisauskas 2002). As trade increased and some individuals became wealthy and lusted after prestige and power, which was demonstrated by giving lavish feasts and being interred in private tombs along with lavish grave goods, including vessels of imported beer (Ristvet 2007:64).

/./WOODBURN ON FORAGER EQUALITY (A SUMMARY)

•Egalitarianism is equality enforced by custom and ethos.
•Lack of ownership prevents inequality from developing.
•Hunter-gatherers are divided into immediate-return systems and delayed-return systems.
•Immediate-return systems use minimal labor to achieve food that is nearly always consumed immediately and they lack any complex food storage structures or processes.
•Delayed-return systems have restricted access to resources rules and have complex food storage structures or processes.
•Delayed-return systems are commonly found in sedentary foraging, farming and herding societies.

Immediate-return hunter-gatherers have certain advantages that support their egalitarian ways:

•Most fundamentally, they lack a storable-stealable-surplus.
•They are mobile and flexible within nature’s larder.
•People can move between camps without penalty i.e., a man or woman experiencing attempts at domination can move away from the aggrandizer.
•Free movement reduces conflict and subverts the efforts of an aggrandizer to establish authority over others.
•The means of coercion (weapons) are a free good and are not controllable by anyone.
•The threat of ridicule thwarts the accumulation of wealth or acting haughty.
•Punishment of deviance is direct and not embedded in formal institutions.
•There is equal access to resources.
•Ownership is limited to a few personal items, which are few given the frequent movement of camps.
•Boundaries are few and diffuse with common cooperation between neighboring bands.
•The ethos lauds sharing, cooperation and community.
•The ethos decries boasting, haughtiness and individualism.
•Games may exist that act to distribute property equally e.g., among the Hadza of Tanzania (1982).

/./THE IMPORTANCE OF LAND

In the world of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers land was only important as a vastness that held resources – animals, plants and water, as well as materials to build huts. Land was not owned, although some bands felt that had rights over waterholes. Rather than fight over land, early humans learned to cooperate with others who roamed neighboring tracts of land.

All this changed, in the first instance, with a few Paleolithic peoples who settled permanent villages in resource-rich environments e.g., the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast and the Calusa Amerindians of modern day Florida. Surely there were other examples that have yet to be discovered by archeologists. In this early societies resources could be accessed at valuable geographic points e.g., a promontory sticking out into a salmon rich river or land adjacent to the sea. These were desirable spots that came to be considered owned by families. But these were isolated instances of the rising importance of land.

But the major shift with regard to land came when humans began to domesticate plants and animals in the Neolithic. At that time it was no longer merely specific points on the map, which were important to humans, but rather it was all arable land in the case of farmers and even marginal lands in the case of herders. Vast tracts of land came to be vital to human existence and ownership became a commonly accepted phenomenon. Often ownership was merely claimed by settling uninhabited land, which could then be worked and passed on to the next generation.

Yet ownership of land could not be held by reference to a legal system in these early days. “Owned” land often had to be held by force of arms, necessitating the development of weaponry and the strategy and tactics of warriors.

In most Paleolithic societies, where land was more or less a free good, no military complex developed, nor do we encounter walled towns. But in the case of sedentary foragers and later Neolithic farming communities we see concerted community efforts to seize, hold and defend land. For example, in the city of Uruk in ancient Sumer (Mesopotamia) archeologists have uncovered one of the world’s oldest known defensive wall formations. Some settlements in the Indus Valley Civilization were also walled. Even the residents of the famous proto-city of Jericho found it prudent to build defensive walls. Later civilizations would add moats, towers and other battlements to protect their wealth and in some cases even farms had to be within walls to protect them from marauders.

/./GENDER INEQUALITY

Hunter-gatherers tend to be egalitarian with regard to gender as opposed to sedentary foragers or those societies affected by the domestication of plants and animals (Leacock 1978). However, there is variation within hunter-gatherers or foragers (Dahlberg 1980). Leacock makes the point that such variation cannot be divorced from the fact of colonialism’s impact and contact with the industrial world by modern day hunter-gatherers. Any variation that exists is variation from a pre-colonial, pre-contact state of gender equity in hunter-gatherer societies.

Woodburn (1982) explains equality in economic terms i.e., those foragers practicing an immediate-return system will differ from those practicing a delayed-return system.

Woodburn has suggested that Australian Aborigines and African hunter-gatherers differ in the amount of egalitarianism in their cultures. Africans tend to be egalitarian because the have an immediate-return system; whereas the Australian hunter-gatherers have a delayed-return system.

Artemova (2003:74-75) rejects the economic explanation with regard to gender inequality in the Aboriginal case (delayed-return system). Rather she posits that greater inequality, social and gender, derives from the fact that in the Aboriginal case there is more intense and elaborate social life and a monopolization of knowledge.

This seems a weak explanation. What causes the more intense and elaborate social life and a monopolization of knowledge? In delayed return systems storage of a surplus is customary and every time we encounter this in the archaeological or ethnographic record we find evidence of hierarchy and/or gender discrimination. No doubt big men begin to restrict access to knowledge and fabricate myths to validate their exclusive access to power and wealth, but the point is that they cannot do this in an immediate-return system as there is no storable surplus to control. Rather than a being a base cause of inequality, knowledge control and fabrication is an intervening variable. Schematically it looks like this:

Storable surplus →knowledge restriction→inequality

/./BIG MAN SOCIETIES

Some societies that have a storable-stealable-surplus develop a big man complex that is likely transitional to chiefship. Big men are village leaders and economic organizers, but they strive for prestige in so doing and do not keep the accumulated surplus for themselves, but rather give food, pigs and shells away in elaborate feasts. They push people to work harder and produce more food so they can hold these feasts and distribute this food widely, certainly to all of the members of their own village but usually to some of the members of other villages as well. In giving away food they are greatly admired and often they are given considerable praise and deference. Prestige and leadership is achieved through control of this wealth in elaborate and competitive ritual exchanges. These big man societies are organized around the circulation and redistribution of wealth (Godelier & Strathern (1991).

In contrast to the egalitarianism of non-storers, in storing societies elites have created an elaborate status ethos and fabricated status positions that distinguish them sharply from commoners (Annett & Collins 1975). Big man societies fall into this category but are distinguished from truly stratified societies by the fact that the élite ethos does not condone accumulation for personal use, but rather big men only accumulate goods to give away in pursuit of high esteem.

/./ARCHITECTURE IN STORAGING SOCIETIES

In addition to changes in ethos, social structure and especially poleconomic changes, architecture changed once widespread storaging societies came into existence. These changes were driven by the need for defense. Villages and towns became nucleated, their narrow passageways a deterrent to invaders. Additionally, walls were built e.g., in Ein as-Sultan in the Jordan Valley shows evidence of a permanent walled settlement from 8,000 YBP. In addition to a number of walls the town had a religious shrine, granaries and a 23-foot tower with an internal staircase (Ring 1994:367-370). These features were clearly the work of a people looking to defend their community, which revolved around the central shrine and granaries.

/./OPPORTUNITY & THE EMERGENCE OF RULES

In the era of Malinowski, Radcliff-Brown, following the works of Emile Durkheim, a functionalist model was developed in anthropology, primarily in British social anthropology, that a unified social system had coherence and its parts were in equilibrium. A social system functioned not unlike a living organism, its various parts operating together over time to hold it together.

In this abstract model one almost never heard anything of human interests, calculating men or conflicting rules. This was corrected by some anthropologists in the generation after Malinowski and Radcliff-Brown, most notably in the works of Edmund Leach and Max Gluckman; and, again most notably in the anthropologists of the Manchester School of thought, presided over by Gluckman. In this perspective, in a very broad sense, the dynamics of social systems are set in motion by political actions, “by men competing with each other to enhance their means and status, within the framework set by often conflicting or ambiguous rules” (Kuper 1996:137).

In my graduate work at Cambridge University I was largely influenced by my supervisor Meyer Fortes, who has largely been regarded as being in line, theoretically, with the equilibrium school, but at the same time I attended lectures by Leach, sat in seminars where he and Fortes argued incessantly and was reading works coming out of the conflict school at Manchester and also the writings of Leach. Also at that time in the early 1970s the equilibrium school was not strong, even at Cambridge. Other lecturers such as John Barnes and Michael Young influenced me and took me in theoretical directions that would have irked Radcliff-Brown. Also, I had done my master’s degree in Sociology in the USA and had been made aware of the conflict approach to social data before ever coming to Cambridge.

In time I developed an approach to social data that was more in line with the conflict school and also the later works of Evans-Pritchard, who moved away from his early functionalist roots to take an interest in history. The other great influence on my thinking in the Cambridge years was to come from the lectures and writings of Sir Jack Goody, who also had an interest in historical processes.

To my way of thinking social systems are made up of rules, but they are not functionally arranged in a manner in which they are in harmony. Rather, they are in conflict much of the time, but are presented by powerful men as being in harmony. I developed this perspective while working through my Sisala data on divination and this view is best
Represented in my article in Ghana’s North entitled “Political economy in a goatskin bag: Attempted symbolic power creation in Sisala divination,” 2003).

Also as I worked through the historical data on the behavior of élites in Catalonia (Mendonsa 2008b) I also encountered calculating men intent of fabricating rules to suit their own ends, often at the expense of others and of society as a whole. I called them scriptwriters, powerful men in a material and political sense that fabricated rules in the pursuit of legitimizing their self-aggrandizement.

In my attempts to explain how egalitarian societies of the Paleolithic gave way to stratified ones and how this inequality was exacerbated with the domestication of plants and animals I have come to see that aggrandizers seized, at every turn, opportunities to gain economic advantage over others and then to fabricate rules to secure that advantage and to turn it into political power. This happened in the Northwest Coast Amerindian case and again in the Calusa Amerindian case, two hunter-gatherer societies that lacked agriculture or herds, but which developed highly complex and unequal political systems. But we are to see the same self-aggrandizement and the creation of rules and political roles by calculating men in the later Agricultural Revolution and beyond.

The social systems that were fabricated once opportunities allowed the development of hierarchical structures were not in any kind of equilibrium, but men had to struggle to put together rule sets and roles that placed them in positions that enabled them to present society to the less powerful as the “only” correct formulation, the “best” way of organizing themselves, an in so doing these powerful men often invoked supernatural backers, the heavens smiling down on their machinations. If the rules and roles of the fabricated society unduly benefited them and theirs, then so be it because God was on their side. When God is not directly invoked as sanctioning the dealings of powerful men, some ideal is. We see this all too often in this modern day and I have only chosen one of the most glaring examples in the aggrandizers of Zimbabwe, the cadre of aggrandizers of Robert Mugabe who manipulate the rules of that society to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority of Zimbabweans. Anyone who follows the news will be able to think of many more examples.

It should be evident that I see a society filled with structural contradictions. In addition to human greed and peevishness, I see conflicts as resulting from these socially constructed contradictions. Max Gluckman (2004 [1963]:28) struggled to understand how social systems could contain deep cleavages in its social fabric and he saw this as a universal situation. The answer lies in the fact that aggrandizers who attain powerful positions in the social framework use their offices to concoct and manufacture rules that benefit them and their constituents, but which may contradict rules already in existence or other rules created post hoc by other aggrandizers. Over time, a social system develops rules, institutions and roles that are in disagreement with each other and which can and do produce social conflicts. In hierarchical systems, with stacked levels of power, one level may be in opposition to another e.g., in modern day America a state may pass rules condoning homosexual marriage, while a given community within the state may have government officials who abhor gays and pass laws to the contrary.

Rule creation can have beneficial or negative consequences for a population as a whole, but just the contrary for a segment of that population. Let's look at the emergence of war, for example. Kelly writes:

The transition from capital punishment to feud or war – that is, the transition than encapsulates the origin of war – is thus contingent upon the development of the companion concepts of injury to the group and group liability that provide grounds for generalized, reciprocating collective violence that takes the form of raid and counter-raid (2004:43).

As a population came upon strategic resources and developed the capacity to produce a surplus, inevitably aggrandizers would arise seeking to control these resources. On way of doing that is by force, but a more long-term solution, one that has the backing of most of the population, would have been to manufacture ideas and rules that would provide the engineer of those rules the right to control the strategic resources. Of course, one strategic resource is the body of people themselves. A powerful aggrandizer may deem it in his or his groups interest to put together an army and he may set about to conjure up ideas and rules – for example, the concept of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – to support his desire for war

The manufacturing process may benefit him and his constituents, but at the same time may not benefit the society as a whole e.g., if they lose the war and are taken as slaves; or it may benefit the élites who derive booty from battles with neighbors, but it may not be quite so beneficial to those made widows and orphans by such skirmishes.

Of course, for anyone reading the newspapers of today, or getting their news in more modern ways, it should be apparent that this hypothetical I have just outlined is a real fact in modern day America. As I write this, my country is at war on two fronts – Afghanistan and Iraq. Men and women killed in those wars leave dependants that are more or less abandoned by their society to fend for themselves even though their husbands and spouses paid the ultimate price for decisions made in the White House and Congress – by the go-getters of my society. Again, those soldiers maimed in combat return home crippled, in mind or body, to a system that does not provide sufficient benefits for them (LeBoutillier 2007). In response to such inequity, organizations like National Veterans Foundation (2010) come to the defense of ailing soldiers who have been abandoned by the rule-makers of the larger system. In this way, institutions fight each other, but behind institutions are two things: (1) the institutional rules that made up the institutions; and (2) the officers of the institutions who have the capacity to re-write the rules. As aggrandizers, those who have struggled to climb to the top of their respective institutional ladders, they will operate based on their assessment of the situation and circumstances of a given conflict e.g., damaged veterans vs. the VA and the politicos in Washington DC.

Again, once aggrandizers gain power they can create rules, but also they can manufacture codes, subtle symbols of their elite status, symbols that are used to congeal their cohorts into an élite and ruling class. Élites and society’s managers develop social structural rules from which other cultural ideas emerge to support their ruling platforms e.g., the code of “omertà” in Sicily, chivalry in the Middle Ages or “civilità” in central Italy. These codes are created, used and manipulated by élites to accomplish their ruling goals. Silverman (1970:338) explains the cultural concept of “civilità:”

In traditional Central Italy, the “signori” class (then the landlords) was supported by an ideology centering about a code of “civilità:” This concept is a combination of personal qualities (generosity, courtesy, restraint) and urbanity (including urbane clothing, non-rustic housing, a distinctive pattern of social interaction pertaining to café and piazza life, non-dialectical speech, genteel manners, and access to urban centers – in physical movement, awareness, and ability to imitate.

The point is that such codes are comprised of subtle symbols of élitism and true élites learn them growing up and use them as power weapons in society. “As a class,” their superior status and power derive not only from the raw power of the fist, but also from the subtle influence of the gesture.

Many ideologies of power are based on old ideas reworked. This occurs as élites adapt to new conditions and opportunities they see in change. Silverman (1970:339), again writing about the code of manners in Central Italy called civilità that developed in the era of large landholders (latifundists) says “it has not lost its validity. It has been extended: now it tends to be defined as the potential acquisition of all individuals.” The new élites are upwardly mobile modern men, not landed magnates and they learn and use the civilità code in their new upper-middle class form of domination just as the old haute monde did in the days of the large farms. In other words, once cultural traits, either rules or codes, are created, they can be used in different ways by culturally savvy individuals, usually élites.

/./THE CREATION OF SYMBOLS OF POWER

Once aggrandizing men saw opportunities to corner wealth for themselves they began to aspire to also control people and they began to devise ways of establishing power positions or offices and, once established, they developed ways of shoring up those positions, to make them unquestionably needed and indispensable. Most aggrandizers intuitively knew, one can safely assume, that power is short-lived and most be converted into legitimate authority before they can hold long-term office and also pass that position on to their offspring or chosen successor.

Once in office, as a little-chief, chief, king, shah, maharajah, mogul, pasha, prince, rajah, sultan, military commander – or whatever high office was held – the officer often developed both a close connection with a shaman, oracle, sacred spot, high priest or some other known and accepted symbol of supernatural power. The idea was to make political power and godly power synonymous in the minds and hearts of the people.

These monarchs also associated their offices with certain powerful animals. For example, in ancient Lydia, in modern day western Turkey, over 2,500 YBP, King Croesus had gold coins minted with the image of a lion and a bull, both common symbols of power in the ancient world. In Celtic mythology the boar was a symbol of masculine power and would have been a prime symbol to be selected by rulers. To many Amerindian tribes it was the cougar as a symbol of leadership, while in South America it was the jaguar. To the oba (king) of the ancient Yoruba of Africa the elephant was his royal symbol, among others. Some African kings wore a cape with the scorpion on the back, symbolizing the stinging power of kingship. In some Muslim folklore, the scorpion is a symbol of power and magic (Frembgen 2004). The Egyptian Pharaohs too used the scorpion as a royal symbol (Waddell 1933). Even the monarchs of Great Britain used the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom with its lion in the royal crest, officially known as the “Arms of Dominion.”

So seeking dominion, early, as well as late, powerful leaders saw the benefits of symbolically linking themselves to cultural icons of power. These symbols were especially powerful if they were seen by the people as linking the monarch to the supernatural realm, the occult world. Early aggrandizing wannabe leaders often linked themselves to existing shamans, as in the case of the Yakut-Mono of California. Let’s see how they did this.

Robert Lowie identified two types of chiefs, titular (temporary leadership) and authoritative (hereditary leadership). The titular chief was a peacemaker who drew his power from public opinion from the force of the group. In no way could he elevate himself above others, but had to be generous to a fault. Rather than authority, his power rested on his oratory, his ability to persuade by reminding his followers of the group's communalistic mores.

Even in the dirty dealing I am about to describe among the titular chiefs of the Yokut-Mono, they cannot be considered to be at the "big" end of the continuum, what Lowie called hereditary chiefs. The Yokut-Mono case shows that maneuvering and strategizing by aggrandizing office-holders began way back, in the earliest times; even though titular chiefs had more societal pressure on them to conform to a set of altruistic rules. And they lack full authority to blatantly circumvent principles of communalism and sharing. However, as the ethnography below will show, that didn't stop them. They went ahead anyway.

The pre-contact Yokut-Mono culture existed in an environment where food collecting and hunting was relatively easy, the climate mild. They were not greatly stressed by their environment, which produced a small surplus for them; nor did they develop the great surpluses we see along the northwest coast, with their great runs of salmon and steelhead. The simple nature of these foragers can be seen in this quote from Gayton:

The political institutions of Yokuts and Western Mono were perhaps as simple as any in California. Clans were lacking. The moiety, where it existed, regulated marriage ceremonial participation. Patrilineal families dwelt together in permanent villages but owned no land other than an ill-defined tribal area. The household group was not large; normally its personnel included a married couple, their immature offspring, and a possible orphaned sister of either spouse, or an aged relative. A husband and father was head of his own household affairs but bowed to the opinion of elder male relatives when the entire lineage was involved. These families were entirely free to go about their daily pursuits of hunting, fishing, seed gathering, basket, pottery, and tool making, seeking of supernatural experience, gambling, or idling, without interference from officials. There were none to interfere. The sense of right and wrong, of duty to one's relatives and neighbors, was instilled in children as they grew up. Truthfulness, industry, a modest opinion of oneself, and above all, generosity, were regarded not so much as positive virtues as essential qualities. Informants today condemn those who are greedy, jealous, or egotistical. It was largely upon the personal character of individuals that the peace of a community depended (1930:408).

Gayton presents detailed myths showing an ideology of chiefship. The chief was thought to be helped by the eagle, which was his familiar spirit and that of his descent group. He was always chosen from the eagle lineage or moiety (sic). In a primordial conference of animals, the eagle was established as the leader, as the tiya (little chief) was the surrogate eagle among men, the leader of a Yokut-Mono community. Because of this mythology, the lineages of chiefs and shamans were “mildly aristocratic."

There were no big chiefs or elaborate hierarchical structures of privilege. Little chiefs, tiyas (sing. tiya) had to maneuver in not very well defined offices in order to pursue their particularistic interests without drawing too much attention from the community they were supposed to serve. Gayton outlines the political structure, limited as it was:

Legal authority over the people at large was wielded by chiefs and their henchmen, the winatums (shaman-bailiffs). The chief's power was expressed as a general jurisdiction having a paternal-judiciary aspect. He made decisions on village or tribal affairs such as holding fandangos (dances), or building a new sweat-house, he settled interfamily disputes, and granted permission for death punishments. His judgment operated in place of fixed laws. The winatums were the coordinating element in the interrelationship of the people and their chiefs: they were the universal joint in the social machinery. Their official activities were many, as executing orders from the chief, making announcements, carrying private and public messages between individuals and tribes, directing camp organization, and managing all phases of ceremonial activity. The presence or absence of the minor officials; subchiefs, and dance managers, made little difference in the powers of chiefs or the freedom of citizens. In other words, the chiefs, with their winatums as manipulating instruments, constituted the sole legal authority in the political system of south central California (1930:408).

Yokut-Mono little chiefs were expected to be good speakers and were always required to say a few words at a public gathering or ceremony. He was primarily a figurehead with little overt power, the office of chief not being well defined with an elaborate status/role attached. Gayton describes the part played by a chief:

The chief, however limited in power, had a social prestige resting upon his position as a protégé of and surrogate for eagle, the mythological creator-chief. He possessed more wealth than the average citizen in spite of the fact that his position incurred more than average expenses. His relations with his subjects had a distinctly patriarchal aspect: he provided food for the poor, settled quarrels, generously paid messengers and ceremonial performers, gave advice on debatable projects, protected public safety by permitting bad shamans and poisoners to be killed, and addressed assemblies in words betokening his desire for the well-being of his people (1930:385).

Apparently the regulatus of chiefly office was not yet thickened. These tiyas were titular chiefs and they could not run amok, being under the control of the opinions of elder men and the community at large. One informant told Gayton:

Men often had their wives or daughters taken by a shaman. If a woman refused to sleep with a doctor or go off with him he would make her fall ill and die. A man who knew or suspected who the doctor was that had thus victimized women of his family would take steps for revenge. Instead of going directly to the chief he would consult first the old and respected men of the village or tribe. He would go to one old man like Joe (Mexican Joe) and explain his case. If Joe thought the offended man was justified he would say so; but he would then send him on to another old man to get his advice, at the same time telling him to express his (Joe's) views. The man would go to four or five such prominent elders and have their unanimous consent to action before approaching the chief. When he went to the chief he would present his case and say that all these men had advised a certain procedure. The chief might disagree but could not refuse in the face of contrary opinion. If the vengeful man had gone to the chief first and the chief had disapproved of the proposal to kill the shaman, that would have been the end of the matter (1930:382).

Little chiefs had a little bit more property than most, being able to siphon somewhat more than pure big men. Gayton goes on to say that the chief was more likely than other men to have multiple wives, a situation thought appropriate because the chief always had to have food prepared in his house to serve to unexpected guests, thus multiple wives were seen as beneficial. The chief had power and some wealth, but people could drop by and eat at his expense, a form of redistribution.

Sometimes the chief would arrange to have the traders stay at his place and sell from there. In this case, he would dispatch his winatums to call the people to come. In this way, the tiya made himself the center of trade:

In monetary wealth the chief always surpassed his fellow-citizens. The manner in which his worldly goods were acquired is not completely clear but there are several known sources. One of these was through commercial trading of desirable objects such as eagle down, and of articles traded with trans-Sierra Mono, or between local tribes. The commerce in eagle down was controlled by the chief as the bird was sacred to him and could not be killed without his permission (1930:374).

Yokut-Mono chiefs were slightly wealthier than others based on this fabricated monopoly in eagle down. Gayton certainly paints a picture of aggrandizing chiefs operating behind paper-thin walls of the machinery of a fragile office. Since chiefs were always from the eagle lineage, which was no wealthier than other lineages, the level of amassable wealth must have been so low as to prevent the rise of spectacularly wealthy descent groups. Wealth alone is not what provided prestige.

The chief's house was perhaps larger than that of others but not necessarily or markedly so. Neither was the dress of a chief or of the members of his lineage distinctive. Stephen Powers states that Yokut-Mono chiefs wore their hair long, but so did all men. The food storehouses of the chief were always well filled. He did not hunt himself. Young hunters in the village provided food for the chief’s family. Such men were not permanently appointed for the task, but would be dispatched by the winatums to get fresh meat or fish for the chief.

Informants disagree as to whether the chief paid for his provisions or not, but the weight of evidence indicates that he did not. The chief had to have a plentiful food supply for it was his duty to offer a meal to every traveler, foreign messenger or stranger who entered his village. Furthermore, the chief or his wives gave meat to extremely poor people or those who had difficulty in obtaining sufficient food, as the aged or widowed, again based on the principle of communalism and reciprocity. Such people would accept the food and if possible would return a little acorn meal to the chief when they had an extra supply. A basket might be given in return, as thanks. Such a return was prompted by courtesy and gratitude and was not compulsory by rule.
Unlike some little chiefs in history, the Yokut-Mono had a loose hereditary system. Gayton says:

As a citizen in the community the chief possessed social prestige based primarily on his revered totem and authoritative office, and secondarily upon the wealth that accrued to him because of his position. His position was acquired by heredity. Normally the office passed from an elder brother to the next younger, and then reverted to the elder brother's eldest son. This rule was not rigid, however, and was modified in accordance with circumstance. When a chief became too enfeebled with sickness or age to continue his duties he would say whom he wanted to take his place. If his choice was acceptable to the other chiefs and elder men of the village, a gift of money was sent to the nominee. The man chosen did not have to accept the office unless he wished to (1930:371-372).

Though as we shall see, some little chiefs were “big criminals,” as chiefs they still heard and ruled on petty disputes and quarrels between individuals and families and problems resulting in murder or serious personal injury were usually brought to the chief's attention for settlement.

Even with their scheming, monopolies and accumulating activities, Gayton notes that there was no wealthy class. He attributes this to the leveling function of such rites as the annual mourning ceremony at which a great deal of property was destroyed and more distributed among those present. This ritualized feast dispossessed a bereaved family of any surplus wealth it might have accumulated. The casting away of gifts at mourning ceremonies had the further advantage of keeping money and coveted objects in circulation.

Gayton, in his study of Yokut-Mono titular chiefs and shamans, showed that both used their positions for personal enhancement and that some collaborated to kill people and take their wealth, which was a covert source of income for these aggrandizers. Shamans, in their unofficial capacities, and little chiefs in their formal roles, would at times conspire to rob and murder, as well as commit a number of lesser misdemeanors. This seems extreme and dramatic fare for quiet foragers in ancient California who were not known as a warlike people. Yet, every society has its aggrandizers.

Clearly, even in this early storaging society, the little chief was receiving support from his community, although he also had responsibilities. Chiefs had various strategies open to them; one was just being chiefly, which attracted wealth:
Further profit came to the chief through intertribal commerce. Traders who came from other tribes with baskets, pottery, salt, tanned skins, etc., would first go to the chief's house to state their business, as was customary with all outsiders, and to receive the welcoming meal. Hence the chief had first chance to buy the wares they brought and retail them to his neighbors if he so wished. As a man of wealth he could take advantage of this opportunity to purchase desirable articles (Gayton 1930:401).

Obviously, chiefship had its privileges. Additionally, Yokut-Mono chiefs also took bribes to allow someone to be killed, even within their own Eagle Moiety. The killer would approach the chief, tell him of his intended victim, reach an agreement as to the payment, and, with the blessing of the newly enriched chief, proceed with his crime. Here we see a classic example, if an extreme one, of a public servant using his office as a shield for antisocial behavior because that behavior enriches him.

But there were more outlays for the chief. Gayton indicates that a chief always had to pay a little more for entertainers, ceremonial performers or specialists, as it was expected that a chief should pay more; but, on the other hand, chiefs made profits when ceremonies were held. It was said that the chief "gave a dance" or "made a ceremony," but that was symbolic. It was in the give-and-take that his position was ratified. It was the flow of wealth through the hands of the chief that counted. Or rather the appearance of flow. While the chief was supposed to be spending more that other, in reality it was the public at large who financed big ceremonies. No public levies were placed on the public in advance but each person at the ceremony was expected to pay.

Because of their control of trade and ceremonies as well as their hidden criminal activities, Yokut-Mono titular chiefs were on the brink of making a profit. This was the generally accepted picture of the chief, but a chief who was not a good man at heart, and who had a desire for too much personal aggrandizement, was thought to have attained it through illegitimate arrangements with malevolent shamans. Chiefs’ selfish had to be kept hidden, behind the shield of office.

Thus, one avaricious strategy open to chiefs was amoral collusion with occult entrepreneurs (winatums). The fear of by officials and attached shaman-bailiffs, and the recorded cases of both chiefs and shamans being put to death, indicate that office-holders and their henchmen did, from time to time, abuse their offices and their imaginary powers.

However, if the aggrandizers had stratagems, so did the community. Given the fact that little chiefs did not control any physical means of coercion, and shamans only had their "imagined powers," it was a simple, direct and straightforward strategy: if a man knew positively that a shaman or chief had killed a member of his family he could take it upon himself to kill the evildoer. He would just get his bow and go out and hide until he had a chance to shoot the man.

Unlike more technologically advanced chiefdoms, where the chiefs had access to superior weapons, guards or warriors, the Yokut-Mono were not unlike peoples in the Paleolithic, where everyone had the same weapons. This acted as a leveler. For instance, it would have been very hard to kill an Egyptian Pharaoh, with his enclosed residence and bodyguards, but the Yokut-Mono people had daily access to both chiefs and shamans and could settle a dispute violently.

A system of beliefs existed in Yokut-Mono society that divided the cosmos into the mundane world and a supernatural realm. Anyone with special powers to communicate with the occult world was considered a shaman or winatum.

While the overall ethic of post-Paleolithic foraging societies was still largely egalitarian and democratic, in time some developed ideas about the supernatural that formed the basis of informal statuses that could develop into powerful means of pursuing vested interests for some men once there was a surplus over which to compete. Among the storaging Yokut-Mono, such ideas revolved around curing and sorcery, the work of shamans. These go-getters were said to have more dream experiences, which was thought to be an indicator of intense contact with the hidden world of spirits.

To seek assistance from supernatural powers for success in gambling, hunting, or general good health and fortune was anyone's privilege. Most Yokut-Mono seemed to rely on their innate abilities, not pursuing the supernatural on their own. Enterprising men did, however. They worked to become shamans so that, in their belief system, supernatural powers would aid them to accomplish more and get more than their neighbors.

While the path to chiefship was defined genealogically, the tiya always coming from the Eagle Moiety, the road to wealth and power for the winatum was more open-ended, easier to access for the common aggrandizer. Gayton explains:
Shaman's power was not of a peculiar sort nor was it inherited. It was merely a greater quantity, an accumulation of dream experiences, say six, to an average person's one or two. The more of such experiences one had the greater his knowledge of the occult would become, and the bond between the individual and the supernatural world increasingly strengthened. In other words, the difference between a shaman's power and that of a non-professional was one of quantity rather than of quality. As one informant expressed it: "A doctor was just a person who had too much power. They got mean, tried to see what they could do just to be doing it, and finally got so they thought they could do anything by means of their power. People would be here yet if the doctors weren't so mean" (1930:389).

Yokut-Mono shamans had two power bases: their close association with chiefs and their occult base. Mystically, they used or created imaginary powers that connected them in the minds of the people more closely with the occult. This connection came in the form of recurrent dreams and the shaman was more frequently able than the average person to access an animal-familiar for secret information, or that was the theory.

Thus, like shamans everywhere, they fostered the hypothesis that secret avenues to special information exist giving them power over others. Gayton says that “their success was largely due to what was doubtless imaginary powers does not matter; they played an awe-inspiring, dominating role whatever its basis.” Furthermore, this was a dangerous path, as shamans who were thought to have become too aggressive were put to death. But that did not deter the strong-minded. The acquisition of wealth and power was worth taking a risk. These were ambitious men in a quiet society, men with the talents needed for the fulfillment of their ambitions.

The avenue to prestige, power and property can be material, as in getting better weapons or owning the means of production; but it can also be based on immaterial imaginings, as in the case of Yokut-Mono shamans.

In the altruistic version of the theory of Yokut-Mono mysticism, shamans were capable of curing people of illness and protecting them against the evil intentions of others. This was a moneymaker. In the antisocial version, the occult powers of the sorcerer could be used to sicken or kill people. Shamans who were successful at curing people were revered; those who appeared to be performing their trade in an evil fashion, as evidenced by an inordinate number of dead patients, were themselves killed. Thus, the use of imagined powers had its rewards and its dangers. Gayton says one shaman who continued to cure after losing patients was the one to be feared. The dead were an indication that he was causing illness just to make money in curing, without regard for public welfare. But the doctor whose avidity led him to such extremes was done away with on slight evidence; he had but a tenuous hold on life. One of Gayton's informants, who had winatums in his family tree and had known them intimately, described the activities of shamans in the following words:

If a man, especially a rich one, did not join in a fandango (festival) the chief and his doctors would plan to make this man or some member of his family sick. The doctor would sicken his victim with the "air-shot" (toiyuc) used in the doctors' contest. The doctor sees to it that he is called in to make the cure. He makes several successive attempts to cure his victim, each time being paid for his services. He withholds his cure until he has financially broken the man and got him in debt. If he then cures the patient he sucks the shot out and shows it to the bystanders, saying that Night or a spring (of water) has made him ill. On the other hand, he may let the person die, in which case the family must perforce join in the next mourning ceremony (and pay out much money to the chief and shaman). (1930:399).

The real power of the shamans came in their alliances with chiefs. By working closely with shamans, through their exercise of imaginary powers, chiefs were able to attain more wealth and power. Gayton outlines the cozy relationship between chiefs and shamans: “The question naturally arises, what were the relations between the chiefs who wielded legal power, and these impressive non-officials of anti-social activities?” It was a reciprocal back-scratching enterprise. In essence, it was a system that greatly increased the wealth of the chief on the one hand, and protected the shaman from the violence of avenging relatives on the other.

Income from murders was divided by the tiya and winatum who had committed the homicide. Should the victim's relatives seek vengeance, for which they must obtain the chief's permission, the chief would then refuse on the grounds of insufficient evidence. “Hadn't the doctor shown that Night had caused the illness?”
In every Yokut-Mono tribe a powerful shaman was the close friend and associate of the chief. This alliance operated in various ways. For instance, they used non-payment for important ceremonies as an excuse to kill. Theoretically no one was compelled to contribute to the annual mourning ceremony, or any other ceremony, for that matter, but dire results often befell those who did not do so. The chief had to keep the money coming in from the rites.
Thus, conjoining in a political economy (poleconomy) of scare tactics, chiefs and shamans would bully the people into contributing to the various ceremonies arranged and controlled by the chiefs and attended to by the shamans.

For the Yokut-Mono, the shaman and chief ran a protection racket not unlike that perpetrated by the Count of Barcelona on the Muslim principalities on the Catalan border. In the Yokut-Mono case, tribal citizens were supposed to be protected by the chief, but they were also at risk of him using his office nefariously, especially when he hooked up with wicked shamans. We will see the same kind of misuse of office on the part of the Count of Barcelona who participated in the abuse of the peasants he was sworn to protect (see Mendonsa 2008a:chapter 9; 2008b).

The Count of Barcelona was high and mighty, surrounded by armed guards, but in the Yokut-Mono case both chiefs and shamans had to be careful not to incur the wrath of the community, as they could be killed using traditional means: with a bow and arrow, a lance or a knife.

It is understandable that there might be a bad egg or two in the basket. But Gayton's ethnography shows that both chiefs and shamans went against public opinion by engaging in secret dealings, sometimes including multiple chiefs, not just one chief with one shaman. This happened in spite of the fact that both chiefs and shamans were sometimes killed for such behavior. It was imperative then, for the perpetrators of malevolence to keep things under wraps, to operate behind the camouflage of office. Yokut-Mono society was small, a little community of face-to-face foragers. In such a setting, secrets were hard to keep, yet conspirators tried. Gayton says:

Lacking newspapers, gossip was rife. Popular sentiment turned against the chief who gave unfair decisions, or was suspected of self-aggrandizement. Such a man was not deposed from office, but gradually lost prestige. He was ignored in favor of another chief. If necessary, a new chief could be selected from among possible heirs, as a brother, or son, or a cousin. Such a drastic procedure was rare, unless the incumbent was insensible. The chief, holding the highest place of respect in the community, would not care to lose it. Loss of respect, loss of prestige, in turn meant loss of wealth, a combination of disasters which no normal man wished to bring upon himself. The intriguing chief could and did hold office, but his selfish enterprises were carried on secretly and curbed by public opinion (1930:411).

Again, Gayton says that " peace and public satisfaction" were maintained through the covert and antisocial use of sorcery and the fear it instilled in people, and that this was done, not only in the covert one-on-one meetings of a chief and shaman; but that, at times, several chiefs would conspire to murder a man, take his property or steal his wife, using their offices and the occult services of shamans as leverage. In the following passage, Gayton emphasized the social order functions of such conspiracies:

(The fear of sorcery) in civil life worked for public good; it was an awe-inspiring force itself, and served as a tool for chiefs when used by them through their shamans. The fear of sorcery operated between any one individual and another. If, as we have said, the peace of a community depended largely upon the personal character of each person, the personal character in turn was determined or molded by belief in supernatural powers which could be turned against one. A man dared not cheat another at gambling or trading, commit adultery, or neglect any civil or ceremonial duty toward his neighbor, lest the offended person visit sickness or death upon him or some member of his family, either by his own power or that of a shaman hired for the purpose (1930:409).

In short, in this foraging society, where information was informally widely spread, aggrandizing chiefs had to use their wiles to avoid detection as they amassed wealth, competed with others and performed crimes. Yet, crime was sometimes perpetrated by chiefs and shamans to make a moral point. Gayton says that there was some justification for the back-room dealings and makes the point that it is not always easy to separate altruism from selfish pursuits:

A chief who hired a shaman to sicken a rich man who did not join in the expenses of a fandango or mourning ceremony was setting a public example at the same time that he was enriching himself. To the chief and to his shaman, who shared the money paid in fees by the sick man, it was unquestionably a matter of financial profit. But from the point of view of the public at large it was a fair punishment. Thus: a man of money who neglected or refused to bear his share of a public expense was placing a heavier financial burden upon his fellow-citizens; furthermore, generosity was an ideal, and the man who failed to contribute his share was showing himself to be greedy, and hence received no sympathy if misfortune befell him. In the absence of any law or system of taxation, it behooved each citizen, especially those of wealth, to participate in the sharing of public expenses, lest he incur the displeasure of the chief and of the public, and sickness or death be visited upon him (1930:410).

This belief system must have operated as a general leveling mechanism, but it was also open to abuse by chiefs who saw the trumpeting of ideal values as a way of making personal profits. We see here how office acts as a screen for personalistic pursuits of office-holders.
It seems that such secret machinations were a “known secret.” Gayton shows that the illicit devices of the shamans and chiefs were so institutionalized that it was even possible to make arrangements for intertribal murders. An informant put it this way, describing the secret meetings of the Yokut-Mono power élite as they hatched up a variation of a protection racket:

A chief may be jealous of a rich man in another tribe. If he wants him killed he sends his winatum (shaman-bailiffs) to several other chiefs of near-by tribes, including that of the ill-fated man, asking them to come to a certain place on a certain night. Tawatsanahahi (Baker's Hill) was a favorite spot for these meetings. The various chiefs together with their doctors came at the stated time. There might be ten to fifteen present, including the doctors and the chiefs' trusted winatums.

The chief who called the meeting addresses the group saying that he and perhaps others want to do away with this certain man, and asks those present for their opinion in the matter. The people who want the man killed put up a sum of money to pay the doctors who are to do the killing. If the doomed man's chiefs want him saved they have to double this sum and give it to the opposing chiefs. If they do not do so they automatically sanction the man's death. The case is decided right there at the time. Very often such a man is killed not because he is rich but because "he knows too much" about doings of chiefs, etc., or because some man wants the victim's wife, and has bribed the chief to have the man killed. If the man is to be killed the doctors start right in to do it. "No matter how far off that man may be the doctors will be able to kill him (1930:399).

Notice that money was involved. Clearly, the chiefs and shamans were using their offices to enrich themselves, sometimes at the expense of society and sometimes causing death to others. Furthermore, this was a widespread practice, as it was carried out in tribes other than the Yokut-Mono. Sam Garfield, an informant, gave this account of a similar political economy (poleconomy) concerning chief/shaman collusion in his own and the neighboring Yandanchi tribe:

The chief always had money. People made him presents when he was going to give a ceremony. If he got short of money he would have his doctor kill somebody who was rich. If the victim chosen belonged to another tribe he would send a gift of money to the chief of that tribe asking that he have his doctor kill the man. If the chief accepted the money he had his doctor proceed with the process of sickening and killing the man. The money received was divided between the chief and the doctor. Doctors who killed this way made sure that the patient would finally send for him by making him more sick for every other doctor that the sick man sent for. Usually we had good chiefs with good doctors, but sometimes even a good chief would bribe a doctor to kill some man he thought ought to be killed (1930:400).

Thus the Yokut-Mono data show their normative structure not so much as coercive in an automatic sense, but as a set of rules, ideas, customs, procedures that could be used as tools for the public good or private aggrandizement. The chief/shaman duo could hold a mourning ceremony because custom demanded it, but also they could benefit from that rite economically.

/./THE CREATION OF RITUALS OF POWER

Fabrication of power goes beyond merely creating rules and institutions of rule, as we have see with the use of symbols of power by rulers, but also politicos routinely manufactured rituals to legitimize their calling to office, for example when the Gothic king Theoderic died in battle, the Goths went on to win the skirmish and his son, Torismund, was made king in a ceremony that highlights the key relationship between warfare and kingship. When the battle were victorious, Torismund was raised on a battlefield shield that had been used in the very battle in which the previous king had died, this being done to symbolize his succession to the office of king and to highlight the linkage between the previous king and the new one (Gaspari 2000:96).

Monarchs employed insignia and rituals to represent and magnify royal charisma (Bertelli 2001). Linking them into what Marc Bloc has called the religio regis (cult of the king). In Hawaii, the king or paramount chief was separated from commoners by eating rituals called ‘ai kapu or “regulated eating” (Valerio 1985:127). That is, the sexes and classes of men, inferior to superior, were not allowed to eat together and each had its own special restricted foods. Noncommensality was, then, a fabricated method of distinguishing rulers from non-rulers e.g., men over women and certain men over others. Valerio notes that this system of noncommensality was based on the opposition of pure and impure and broke out thusly: pure : impure :: male : female :: male superior : male inferior (1985:128). Of course, Mary Douglas (1966) described such concepts as ways of symbolizing organizational structure or its disorganization. For example, for a paramount chief or king to eat special foods alone and for commoners not to participate symbolizes the proper political order of things. Should they eat together it would be, in Douglas’s terminology “matter out of place.” Once created, such categories have great power over people’s minds and with such an established system of thought it would be much more difficult to depose those at the top of the designated hierarchy for that would be destroying the “pure” and creating a condition in society of “impurity.”

Valerio (1985:128) notes that the political hierarchy was built on the alimentary separation of the sexes, with its strong associated taboos. Again, should one violate the political hierarchy, it would be tantamount to breaching the taboos of gender separation. Kamakau (1961:223) confirms that the structure of kingship and the hierarchy of males in society was built on the more basic alimentary separation by taboo (‘ai kapu) of the sexes, in fact it was the ‘ai kapu “that gave the chiefs their high station.” Men alone could, by eating restricted species of animals and plants, establish a connection with Deity. Hawaii gives us a clear case of this connection because, in fact, this taboo was violated by King Liholiho, in a revolutionary move, in 1819 in order to abolish the old hierarchical system. Significantly, he initiated this destruction by publically eating with women and the people clearly saw that the royal kapu and the food kapu had been abolished (Remy 1862:141). Kuykendal (1938) indicates that this shattering symbolism opened the door to the rise of female chiefs in Hawaiian history. The structure of domination that previous royals had put in place to bolster their rule was destroyed by a revolutionary using the very symbolism of ‘ai kapu. With this act, the idea that men were more pure than women fell away and women were permitted to enter into a new relationship with the gods.

Rituals of power involve the use of powerful symbols such as alimentary separation and sacrifice. Eating taboo foods gave men a symbolic connection to the gods in Hawaii and, concomitantly, the sacrificer stood as a mediator between Humankind and the gods. It was in the interest of Hawaiian kings and chiefs to establish a linkage with Deity through contact with such ritual specialists, sacrificers or priests, who had a permanent connection to the Sacred. We have elsewhere seen this relation between the politico and the shaman e.g., in our analysis of the Yakut-Mono chiefs and shamans. It is a common way in which politicos link up to the hidden power of the Sacred. Linkage with a human who has specialized knowledge and a permanent connection to the supernatural provides rulers with an edge on the common man.


Statue of a Hawaiian Monarch, King Hamehameha (c. 1758–May 8, 1819).

In Hawaii, sacrifice by royals gave them a special link to mana, the
hypothesized power of the gods. Valerio (1985:131) indicates the extremely important linkage between the gods and the two persons involved in sacrifice, the priest and the royal authorizing the sacrifice. He writes:

In the person of the sacrificer human actions are translated into divine actions, divine actions into human ones. Visible symbols are transformed into invisible realities and invisible realities into visible symbols. The sacrificer can function, then, not only as a specialist who lends his knowledge to the [royal] sacrificer, but as a substitute for the latter with respect to the god to whom he is connected. Reciprocally, he can function as a manifestation and spokesperson for the god within the context of the rite [my addition].

/./BORNU IN THE WESTERN SUDAN: THE PALACE ECONOMY

The economies of the Western Sudan, e.g., Bornu, had an ideal model of a beneficent state. Cohen (1991:118) outlines it like this:

State power and authority emanated from a walled citadel wherein dwelt the monarch and his court of nobles, religious practitioners, and the craftsmen and traders who serviced the governmental aristocrats both slave and free. Outside the capital town were the villages, chieftaincies, tributary states, nomads, and foreign powers that competed in the region with one another for control over the countryside and its peoples.

Back and forth went various go-betweens and travelers, but the surplus flowed from countryside to citadel.

There are scholars that feel that the palace economy of the Western Sudan was about egalitarian redistribution of goods by a benign state (Watts 1983). This researcher felt that the redistributive economy of that region was a “moral economy,” not a political economy, with its negative connotations, wherein emirs provided a minimum income for the needy in times of draught, which were common to the area (1983:89). This was, according to Watts (1983:123) sees this as having been a kind of “shock absorber” whereby leaders shared the food stocks they received annually from the peasants. Household reciprocity was seen by these apologists of the redistributive system. Political leaders could accumulate a great surplus because it was their obligation to redistribute such food in times of need (Raynault 1976:88). Again, Nicolas (1969:197) saw the king’s capital as a giant granary for the welfare of loyal subjects. It was not that the rulers were lacking in self interest, for they understood that if they violated the expected largess in times of need they would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the political economy (Watt 1983:135-136).

This myth was debunked by Ronald Cohen (1991) who noted that the early Sudanic state of Bornu was certainly a redistributive political organization, but it was anything but a generator of equality. Rather, it was a power center that “both protected, redistributed, and simultaneously preyed on, persecuted, and quite impersonally destroyed those near or even within its borders for the sake of maintaining power or enriching its treasury and the coffers of its leaders” (1991:109).

In other words, redistribution systems were susceptible to siphoning, both by those at the very top and by tax collectors. Conflict between monarchs and their tax collectors and provincial governors has filled innumerable pages of history books. Kings and emperors were piqued when they couldn’t get all the loot.

Redistributive monarchs distributed goods but there is more to the story. Cohen continues: “The political economy of the early state was many things, but above all it was fearsome and destructive. … One of the primary characteristics of such states was the capacity for, and the ready delivery of – terror (1991:110). Professor Cohen states that such writers focus too much on the ideal model of the beneficent state and not on the hard and cold reality of a stratified society with a siphoning élite. After all, the emir had to support a large and expensive court nobility in the capital, as well as equip a large army –10 thousand or more in Bornu. This had to be an expensive army to defend the pre-nineteenth century capital city of Ngazargamo on the River Yo, a circular walled city one mile in diameter enclosing tens of thousands of people. Even the great army was not enough. By the time the Europeans arrived it laid a set of newly burnt ruins. The problem the Emir of Ngazargamo encountered was that he was not the only monarch engaged in using his defense force offensively to accumulate goods and slaves.

According to Cohen, “Not only was the moral economy not always moral, it was systematically at variance with its ideals as part and parcel of its very nature and the conditions of survival for these early states (1991:115). He portrays those apologizing for a stratified society as deluded into think that it was a kind and just state, largely for two reasons: (1) that somehow stratification, extraction of value by élites and oppression inherent in hierarchical redistributive systems was overcome by the Islamic traditions of justice and charity; (2) that before the unjust imposition of colonialism the states of the Western Sudan lived up to those traditions and if they were not during and after the Colonial Era, it was due to the disruption of the oppressors. While Cohen admits there is some truth to point two, and I have written on this for the region and see some validity for the negative impact of colonialism in Africa (Mendonsa 2002), Ron Cohen lived and worked in the Western Sudan as an ethnographer of extraordinary ability. He knew whereof he spoke when it came to Africa when he wrote of this perspective: “this is no excuse for swallowing its distortions with its validity” (1991:117).

I have indicated that as aggrandizers began to fabricate rules and codes that especially benefited them and their followers they created complexity that we came to call a state. States are not usually, in history, benign and can become very oppressive of the people. Cohen is aware that the states of the Western Sudan did “create loyalties, did provide welfare benefits and adjudicative services, and they protected citizens against the depredations of hostile forces outside the kingdom” but he goes further, saying that these states “were dependent upon coercive, often brutal forms of suppression and exploitation that created the insecurity upon which hierarchy and its benefits depended” (1991:117). Taxation, tribute and the imposition of corvée labor, under the threat slavery, can be seen as a form of terror. When the people devised the saying that the emir was never without food, it had twin edges: (1) when we are in need, he will have food to provide for us; and (2) when we are starving, he and his courtiers will not. As with most states, value flowed uphill and the pipes of extraction leaked along the way. Reyna (1990) rightly called this “predatory accumulation.”

How did the emir and his crew obtain this wealth from the people? Cohen (1991:119) writes:

Taxation was regulated through the fief holding system, a harvest and cattle tax, as well as a general tax named a religious tithe (zakat), but given directly to the monarch (as Commander of the Faithful) through intermediaries who collected it nationally rather than through the fief system. In addition, a prolific number of special gifts were sent up the hierarchy, for lower offices, for adjudication services, for market fees, for almost any specialized functions in the economy that were regulated from the court.

Such sophisticated extraction systems were the result of the earlier efforts of aggrandizers who began to create nascent versions of such extorting schemes. Sovereigns like the Emir of Bornu inherited already formed institutions that enabled him and his courtiers to live extremely well at the expense of the general population. As with the Count of Barcelona (see below) the emirs of the Western Sudan used the power of the state, not only to exploit their own people but to oppress weaker states and groups within striking distance of their armies.

Bornu was one of the most powerful states in the Western Sudan and extracted tribute from less powerful states nearby. Cohen (1991:120) notes: “Tribute could run to thousands of units of grain, thousands of cattle, goats and sheep as well as horses and camels, and the local craft goods, especially armaments. Failure to deliver meant war and destruction.”

Monarchs of these tribute paying states had to further oppress their own people in order to pay such demands by the guys with greater firepower. This was an internal consequence of inter-state warfare, but there were external effects as well. The interstate environment was in a state of ongoing turmoil, with the threat of warfare hanging over the lesser heads of state in the region if they failed to support the Emir of Bornu with troops and tribute. If a monarch shirked on his commitments to Bornu it meant instant shrinkage in his powers and perhaps the loss of his head (Cohen 1971)

War and plunder of recalcitrant payers of tribute was common, as the élite leaders needed a constant flow of money to fund their extravagant lifestyle. Foreign debts were a problem for the emirs of these Western Sudanese states, as they were engaged in long-distance trade with Sub-Saharan Africa and providers as far away as Venice and Turkey. Traders brought sumptuary goods for the self-perpetuating nobility in the forms of exotic clothes, cloth, dates, camels, horses and the like. In return, they sent abroad leather goods, beautiful Qur'āns, and slaves of two types: (1) women and (2) eunuchs, which were surgically “manufactured” when males were captured in war. It took about 50 surgeries to produce one living eunuch (Cohen 1991:121-122). Any ruler who fell into serious debt was forced to go to war to get such trade goods, lest his imports be cut off and the sumptuous lifestyle of him and his followers be jeopardized. This meant warring on his neighbors, but in dire times he was sometimes forced to raid his own people.

Mounted soldiers were trained to dispassionately raid and plunder to fill the coffers of the élites. This was economic plunder and carnage designed to maintain fear in a population so that they would continue to pay tribute, but also to get horses, cattle, women and slaves to pay the debts of the emirs to distant traders.

Nobles, those retainers of the emir with titles, had license to terrorize the general public. Professor Cohen personally witnessed a modern-day noble burn down the hut of a commoner who refused to give his wife over to the élite man for sexual services (1991:123). Before the colonial hegemony, the noble told the ethnographer, he would have killed the man and taken the woman. There was not redress for such acts of brutality because the perpetrators were titled men close to the emir.

Nobility was supposed to be a two-way street, with those on high both receiving and giving away in times of drought or famine. Yet Barth (2009 [1857]) recorded that rich élites, who had storehouses stocked full of aged foodstuffs taken in raids or received as tribute, during times of shortage waited for prices to rise and then sold on the open market using the famine induced shortage to enrich themselves because their high positions in the political hierarchy allowed for large stores that could be used for market speculation.

This exaction of tributes and raids by nobles in cahoots with the state was an unpredictable exercise in greed. That is, peasants could plan for the payment of annual taxes, but devastating demands could be made at any time for political reasons well beyond the ability of country folk to know or prepare for in advance (Cohen 1991:125). In other words, the state and its resident nobility were a hardship on the people. They suffered from state terror. As Cohen nicely put it, death and taxes “often comingled” (1991:126).

/./MYCENAE: THE PALACE ECONOMY

Mycenae (ca. 3,600 – 3,100 YBP), a short-lived early Greek society, existed in the last stages of the Near Eastern Bronze Age, which spanned a time frame between 5,300 and 3,200 YBP. In the transition from foraging to an agricultural economy, go-getters worked to establish themselves in newly created positions of leadership. In so doing, they were angling to take control of at least part, if not most, of the economy. This was the beginning of aggrandizing, but it would continue and grow. For example, in later Bronze Age Mycenae they succeeded in creating a palace economy, which was a redistributive economy for a few chosen members of the society, but archaeological evidence hints that some of the economic activity in this society remained outside the grasp of these nascent controllers. Later stronger states would expand such palace economies, but apparently the Mycenaean leaders were not yet as strong as the kings and emperors that would follow.

In Mycenae a portion of the wealth flowed into the control of the centralized administration and out from there to a portion of the general population. It was a command economy in embryo. The palace and its economy dominated the city, which was fortified. If it was good to lead such a palace economy, it was also beneficial to be attached to it, for the palace employed mural painters, administrators, carvers, metal workers (bronze), chefs, shepherds, courtyard sweepers and many others (Ristvet 2007:124). And these workers could also have independent sources of income e.g., farms outside the city walls. Some workers were slaves but many Mycenaeans lived and worked in nearby villages independently of the palace economy, except for the requirement to pay tribute to, and provide services for, the palace.

The palatial economy was also involved in long-distance trade. We know this because Mycenaean pottery, large colorful jugs, often decorated with scenes of marine life have been found across the ancient world – the Mediterranean, the Levant, in Greek isles, Southern Anatolia and as far as Egypt. We know this from various archaeological discoveries, including the find of a heavily loaded ship that went down off the coast of Turkey ca. 2,350 YBP. The ill-fated ship was carrying cargo from a wide geographic area. It was laden with goods from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, including a ton of resin, 350 copper ingots, tortoise shells, Baltic amber, elephant tusks, hippopotamus teeth, jars of olives, ostrich eggs and Mycenaean pottery (Finlay 1981:206). Many scholars contend that this wide flung trade could only have been controlled by a centralized state (Fagan 1992).

/./ EXPLOITATION BY ÉLITES

When élites get their hands on the reins of power they have unequal access to the economic surplus. Along with the desire for prestige, the thrill of wielding power, this was often their motivation for seeking high office. Officialdom is a set of institutions and offices that already has a certain legitimacy to it when accessed by élites. In a society with a history of kingship, a man becomes king and is automatically in an authoritative position to access power, prestige and property. But what of élites that do not yet have a legitimate grasp on power? How do they get it? Let's look at some cases.

In chapter four of my book on Catalonia (Mendonsa 2008) I wanted to understand how the extortion inflicted on the peasantry by landlords, in collusion with the Count of Barcelona, was extended to international relations. What was the pariah ideology that pervaded foreign policy in Catalonia? How did imperialism go beyond the crusade against the Muslims?

We have grown up with the assumption that civilization exists. And that progress is afoot. To be sure there are bumps in the road, but – all in all – we probably live in a safer world today than the people of Catalonia faced at the time of the rise of the Extortionist State, at least in the short term. Criminality is one of those bumps in the road.

Recently, we have become more aware that terrorism is another through 9/11. Violence is and was a fact of life, but generally, people make the distinction between legitimate violence perpetrated by the state and illegitimate forms. The latter is called piracy or brigandry or some such label that indicates that the majority of people – society – is against this form of violence. This is the binary contrast H. A. Ormerod (1927) sets up in his discussion of piracy in the ancient world: “Throughout its history the Mediterranean has witnessed a constant struggle between the civilised peoples dwelling on its coasts and the barbarians, between the peaceful trader using its highways and the pirate who infested the routes that he must follow.” His dichotomy can be seen in the box above.

This is an unrealistic view of the world. Sometimes extortion can be part of state behavior and defined by officials to be legitimate. According to Marshall B. Clinard (1990), this analogy between organized crime and state behavior can even be extended to multinational corporations operating in the Third World today.

Criminals and aggrandizers within the Extortionist State operate under structural constraints, but can do so by corrupting the structure and/or knowing the structural side streets and passageways in which they can pursue their clandestine operations. Some have called these Pariah States.

Certainly Catalonia is a prime example of a Pariah State in the Middle Ages. In Catalonia, the métier of the élite had always been war, plunder and imperialism. But there were less adventurous economic pursuits as well. Barcelona’s preliminary economic base was the agricultural output of the hinterland. Resident traders bought farm goods and transported them to the city. Too, there was a fishing industry, before shipping and long-distance trade and conquest became prime forces in Barcelona’s economic history. In the 12th century mundane economics changed to become more imperialistic. The city was transformed from an undeveloped backwater town to a long-range emporium through a commercial revolution, which was, in large part, fueled by wealth obtained through extortion.

In the sociological literature, organized crime is portrayed as being synonymous with “corruption, murder, extortion, terror, manipulation, and guile” and as being “involved in conscious, willful, and long-term illegal activities.” To apply this definition to the activities of the Catalan State we only need to change one word – “illegal.”

Notice how Mahan’s statement below applies with equal fluidity to the way in which the Crown and the urban patriciate operated poleconomically in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean:

OC [organized crime] generates profit for gangsters by corrupting the authority structure. From corporate criminals to pirates, the pattern is similar. Their goal is entrepreneurial. They are bonded by necessity for secrecy. They use violence as a tool and as an expression of power. They are constrained by the opportunity structures, but they take advantage of them as well [my insert. 1998:237].

The characteristics of organized crime as outlined by Adadinsky (1994) show a striking similarity to the activities of the Catalan State in its relations with the Muslim world. Both consisted of:

 Non-ideological – profit is the driving force, a trait shared with most economic corporations.

 Hierarchical – a few at the top dominate and reap most of the benefits.

 A lack of transparency – secrecy is needed to maintain a limited membership and curtain access to profits.

 Organizational commitment based on loyalty – disloyal members are dealt with severely as they threaten to make the organization transparent.

 Organization perpetuates itself – new recruits are trained by members to a normative structure.

 Willingness to use violence and bribery – violence, corruption, deceit and extortion form organizational essence.

 Having a specialized division of labor – different talents are organized to reach an organizational goal.

 Monopolistic – market control is vital because the primary goal is maximizing profits.

 Code of honor – forms the basis of group ethos.

Again, the only word that needs to be changed in Adadinsky’s definition is “illegal.” Essentially the Extortionist State of medieval Catalonia operated as an organized crime syndicate.

The Count of Barcelona reformulated his authority, just after the seigneurie banale. Over the next two centuries this project was carried forward by successive counts building up the Catalan State. During that transition, Barcelona developed an expansionist ideology. The count-kings became involved in two kinds of extortion: external and internal. State extortion was somewhat like what goes on in the Mafia, but with slightly more transparency.

Initially, state income came from loot taken and tribute exacted from Muslim principalities to the south. This wealth was invested in more wars and the expansion of Barcelona’s maritime economy, which led later count-kings to colonize many outposts in the Mediterranean and to extort tribute from port cities along the Barbary Coast (see Mediterranean map, p. 259). This can be viewed as state piracy, a form of aggrandizement clothed in the legal fictions of the state.

You could almost forgive the self-aggrandizement on the part of the Count of Barcelona, but toward what social good did this extortion money go? Very little. Mostly it supported more war, imperialism, high living for the king and his viziers, construction of monumental architecture and kingly tombs. Barcelona also loved parades and ceremonial frivolities organized to bolster the prestige of the state. Little went to aid human security in Catalonia.

External Extortion and the Reconquista

When the Moors invaded Iberia, an apocalyptic atmosphere came over Christendom. All sorts of prophecies and explanations of the loss of so much Christian land were expounded. Both Christians and Muslims were relying on diviners, oracles and prophecies to orient themselves in the chaos of war. Some showed darkness ahead; others divined light if sin could be expiated and the path of righteousness trodden. Booty may have been important in the Christian response, but the search for it was covered in a veil of piety. The Prophetic Chronicle said, “Our hope is Christ…that the enemies’ boldness may be annihilated and the peace of Christ be given back to the Holy Church.” It did not seem to matter that there had been precious little “peace” in the land prior to the invasion of the Muslim south. But now there was a theological justification for the exercise of preexisting warfare and pillage.

The ideology of the Reconquista was born in 11th and early 12th centuries. For Catalonia, the Reconquista was mainly about taking back land in Valencia and Mallorca. The Book of Feats of Arms (Llibre dels Feyts) concerns the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276) and stresses Catalan nationalism and the importance of conquest in the national character. This chronicle contains a first person account of the Catalonian Reconquista. It was composed in Catalan by an unknown author, though Jaume is thought to have written at least some of it between 1244 and 1274. It chronicles many adventures.

This military adventurism was part of the larger Crusades. Pope Gregory X (1271-1276) saw several advantages for Christendom in the Crusades. Of course, they were intended to liberate the Holy Land, but the pope reasoned that they also could help unite Christendom after the divisive disputes over his reform movement. Then again, he felt that papal prestige would rise at a time when his rule had its dissidents e.g., those supporting the German Emperor. Also, he hoped the Crusades would work toward terminating the schism between the two halves of Christendom – east and west.

Then there was booty, which could pay the expenses of a strike into al-Andalus and also produce a profit. Booty was an important motive in the crusades, involving the taking of slaves, gold, silver, precious stones and cloth, sheep and cattle. For example, one-fifth of the loot went to the king/count and the remainder was divided among the expeditionaries, the dependents of those who had been killed in battle and those who had stayed behind to guard the castles and domains of the castle-lords.

The Count of Barcelona had a more pecuniary outlook, clothed in papal and chivalrous rhetoric. Certainly religious fanaticism and military valor became the dominant values in Iberian society during the Reconquista. However, the count was mainly interested in receiving parias, or protection payments in gold. The Muslim south had gold that was being transported over the Sahara Desert from West Africa into Iberia. Parias were paid by Muslim leaders in the south to thwart invasion by the Catalonians.

At this time, the County of Barcelona was not only being constructed as a lineage in a political sense, but also as an economic powerhouse and extortion was good economics. To an extent, the counts and count-kings of Catalonia participated in an extortionate protectorate over nearby petty princes of al-Andalus. It had functioned as a channel for tribute into Catalonia and would act as a directorate for military campaigns against al-Andalus, their object being to find booty and land. This was a larger state-sponsored version of the exaction exercised by the castle-lords of the seigneurial banale. Both must be seen in the cultural context of a medieval fascination with masculine adventure and the Christian context of a crusading mentality.

There was the flow of wealth into Barcelona, but there was a counter flow. That involved settlers taking up land in former Muslim territories that were conquered. Some Catalans were moving south. The Reconquista also provided many commoners with the opportunity to acquire noble privileges. Some Catalans were moving “up.” These special cases were termed ciutadans honrats. Honors were meted out to those who either earned them in war or paid for them.

Derek Lomax says, “Christians were interested in booty, rustling and land-grabbing, and even though allegedly fighting for God they were often cruel and deceitful.” Of course, these traits more than likely pertain to a Holy War anywhere, no matter the creed, then or now. 9/11!

The Reconquista was a deliberately planned campaign, albeit it a long and disjointed one. When land was reclaimed, Christian settlers were brought in and (sometimes) Muslim farmers were expelled. Others were kept on as conversi workers. At other times, Christians moved into existing Muslim communities.

New Catalonia lands gave the Crown some breathing space by relieving it of the burden of having to supply too many fiefs from its own holdings. The Reconquista movement led to the availability of much booty, gold and land for paladin knights and adventurous nobles. It “was precisely the availability of large tracts of land as the Reconquista progressed that made it unnecessary to resort to the benefice – the conditional grant of land at home – as the sole or even chief means of rewarding or creating a mounted force.”

When adventurers settled down in New Catalonia, they set themselves up, just as their forefathers had done in Old Catalonia in the past, as providers of fiefs in return for loyalty and military service. In so doing, they passed on the ethos of feudal loyalty.

New Catalonia gave upwardly mobile noble sons and a chance at acquiring a landed estate. In this way, they could use violence to procure a patrimony that, in time, would become legitimized and clothed in the raiment of landlordism. Thus, plunder was defined by the state as legal aggrandizement. Time and effort on the part of the new owners transformed their ill-gotten gains into a respectable freehold. As I mentioned earlier, these landlords did this by perpetuating “noble” manners and by reproducing clothing fashions, an equestrian lifestyle, speech patterns, élite patronymics, etc. War plunder, in time, became the time-honored privilege of its owners. By definition, a noble had land and a personal and familial history of militaristic adventure. Raiding the Saracen south gave Catalan aristocrats and petty knights a chance at both.

Catalonians organized to make such raids and sometimes the clergy were involved, though some clerics resisted. Under the count-king Alfons I (1162-1196) of Aragón, in 1164, the Cistercian Abbot, Raimundo, formed many volunteers into a religious confraternity and they began to fight the Muslims as it had been hoped the Knights Templar would do. Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) took the new order under his papal umbrella and approved its rule. These “real friars” were charged with the responsibility “to fight the enemies of the Faith” and were given a rule of life (regula) based on that of Cîteaux, but modified to facilitate warfare. There were other lay confraternities convened by the Count of Barcelona for military purposes e.g., Belchite (1122) and Monreal del Campo (ca. 1128) but lacking a religious base, they tended to die out after their fighting was over. In fact, in Arago-Catalan times, “other orders wilted in the shadow of the Templars and Hospitallers who flourished there more than anywhere else in Europe.”

The church, primarily in the form of monasteries, was active in claiming new lands in the Reconquista. After the Sword conquered, the Cross came in to develop the land. For example, Tarragona’s plain was considered a great depopulated area described in 11th century charters as a horrible and vast wasteland “where no human nor sheep grazed.” Yet, the monks moved there and began to improve the land.

The Reconquista was a slow process. Christians held between a fifth and a quarter of Iberia in 1100 and by the 13th century the greater part was ruled by Christian kings, Granada not being taken until 1492. But slow or not, it was a very profitable adventure for aggrandizers in Catalonia.

Eventually the game ended. When the Almoravids began to batter both Muslim and Christian alike in Iberia, the river of gold flowing into Barcelona was reduced to a trickle. When El Cid had disappeared from the scene, the kickbacks were almost dried up. With the Cid’s buffering state gone, the Almoravids fiercely attacked Muslim and Christian alike. Tortosa and Valencia fell in 1102. Lleida and Zaragoza capitulated in 1110. The North Africans raided into Catalonia, attacking Barcelona in 1114-1115, but they were repelled in a ferocious series of battles, in which they suffered heavy losses and their tide of victories was stemmed. Despite the defeat, the “river of gold” did not begin to flow again and the Catalans had to resort to raids for booty, the tenor of which increasingly took on the ideological mantle of religious crusades. From a poleconomic perspective, no doubt the premium mobile was loot.

Internal Extortion

The Count of Barcelona, in conjunction with the great lords of the land, worked to extract monies from the poor within Catalonia. They did this in two ways: at the tip of the sword i.e., by threat of violence and through actual violence; and by claiming the right to do so, backing this claim up with documentary evidence, the very nature of which had been fabricated by the aristocracy.
The Count of Barcelona also extended his extortionate to cover the high and low of Catalonia. After 1060, Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1076) saw the methods of the seigneurie banale and copied them to reestablish comital law. That is, through convenientiae documentation, he established power-dependency linkages with regional magnates to reinstate himself as a sovereign. His main concern was now to make and maintain alliances with élites and, in so doing he abandoned his former obligations to protect the peasantry. Bonnassie (1975-76; 1980; 1991) saw Catalonia as a fully feudal society by 1100.

Having drawn the aristocracy and gentry into relations of dependence, the Count of Barcelona also moved to establish a legal basis for a clamp down on peasants through that legal frame that became known as the remença system. Over time, the ambiguity of servile status was codified and fixed in law through a series of procedures that tended to define a servile status for rusticos or members of the lower order. After 1150, the protection of the church’s Truce of God was removed and increasingly the right of seigniorial mistreatment would be recognized as legitimate. Castle-lords developed their own courts and denied access to comital justice. Farmers were legally tied to the land and moved from owner to owner as the land changed hands. Freedman observes, “rustics in much of Old Catalonia would be effectively made serfs between 1150 and the legislation of 1283 that completed the legal structuring of the remença system.”

The House of Barcelona could now extract rents from all levels of Catalan society. The establishment of the novos usaticos by the lordship and their embrace by the Crown’s jurists, effectively embedded these oppressive practices in officialdom. As the count appointed skilled scribes and notaries to organize his financial and legal structures, the system became an even more rationalized extortion racket.

In short, the count-kings created a more efficient system of greed, one which not only benefited the higher-ups, but the accountants who managed the process themselves e.g., the extraordinary accountant, Guillem Durfort, at the end of the 12th century. Enriching themselves like other patricians less luminous, “he and his family played the game of royal-baronial credit to the hilt.” There were large crumbs dropped at the royal table.

The counts had come to embrace “seigniorial piracy” moving alongside the landlords to impose completely arbitrary dues on the people. They were commonly known as forcias or toltas, as opposed to customary payments of a conveniently miscellaneous nature known as usatici. Forcias, which also came to be known as mali usatici or malae consuetudines, were the cutting edge of Sword Power. The popular sentiment was that these were “bad, new customs as opposed to the good old law.”

What protection did the peasantry have? Castle-lords had become ever more mercenary and greedy. The abbots had modified the monastic rule against exploiting the labor of others and joined alongside the bishopric to grow rich on the labor of farm tenants. And now the Crown had joined the feast.

The Extortionist State: The Mediterranean

The 12th century was a time of expansion and turnaround, when Barcelona “leaned seaward, towards a destiny like Venice’s or Genoa’s.” It became a maritime power, its merchants becoming involved more and more in shipping and the government increasingly in “tribute farming” throughout the Mediterranean and southern Iberia. These were imperialistic activities designed to plunder certain areas and extort tribute from those wealthy regions that feared such pillage. Barcelona’s Crown led the way into governmental brigandry in al-Andalus and then expanded their executive banditry into the Mediterranean Sea.

Sometimes imperialists from Catalonia conquered islands or took poleconomically strategic ports by force, but at others they established treaties under threat of force. These provided a stream of revenue from North Africa and Mediterranean ports. Sometimes, to avoid the appearance of boldfaced exploitation exacted payments went under several guises. For instance, in the 1271 treaty between Catalonia and Tunis tribute was obscured as a payment for the loan of mercenaries. Similarly, in 1274, 1309 and 1323 treaties with Morocco and a 1309 treaty with Bejaïa, payments were couched as being for troops or galleys or both. Another treaty with Tunis of 1301 hid the tribute as compensation for a despoiled shipwreck.

Sometimes it was concealed as a continuation or rival of the sums demanded by previous rulers – in short, protection money. Often these treaties were defined to be economically beneficial for foreign merchants and governments, but they were required to make full payment even if scripted “economic ventures” produced insufficient profits to make such payments from revenue earned. This was common in North Africa and was an extension of the Catalan habit of bleeding Moorish neighbors of protection money.

This was imperialistic stake claiming par excellence. And much of it involved slaving. For instance, in 1243 a special toll was applied to commerce between Tarragona and the Barbary Coast. The cargo was human, the only commodity mentioned on the shipping manifests.

Arago-Catalan imperialism in the Mediterranean was intent on creating colonies or commercial zones that would feed revenue back home to Barcelona. One such colony was Sásser (Sassari in Sardinia). The Sards were disposed in 1329 and King Alfons III (1327-1336) set about the rationalization and formalization of this takeover. Between 1330 and 1333, he gave out 166 allodial honoraria (land parcels), made up of land proprietorships and jurisdictional privileges to knights, notaries, office-holders and others who had been involved in the conquest. In addition, he granted 1,393 fiefs, which were land grants with only rights in usufruct involved. Clearly, warfare in the Mediterranean was a venture with an economic payoff at the end of the road. Not only did adventurers get new land, but also they were able to enslave the locals and export them for profit. Between 1370 and 1442, thousands of Sards, for instance, were indentured and shipped to foreign lands.
The imperialistic assault on the Mediterranean provided Barcelona with strategic points d’appui of economic warfare, stepping-stones across the sea to “the lands of saints and spices.” Following an aggressive imperial policy, Crown pirates plundered the Mediterranean taking Majorca, Minorca, Sicily, Malta, Gozo and laying title to Sardinia and Corsica. Crown piracy was justified citing illegal piracy as a raison d'être of attack and also the invasions were framed as an aid to the anti-Saracen cause – the Crusades against infidels. In 1311, Jaume II (1291-1327) wrote to the pope justifying the growth of the Crown’s imperialism in the Mediterranean in terms calculated to appeal to the crusading fervor of the Council of Vienne. He claimed that Arago-Catalan conquests were going forward because “the Christian army” might always have islands to stop at on their way to and from the Holy Land.

The House of Barcelona turned eastward to dominate Sicily, Sardinia, Alicante to the south of Valencia and the Balearic Islands about the same time as Catalonia and Aragón were forming alliances that helped lead to building the nation of Spain. These Mediterranean jewels came under the control of the last kings of Aragón-Catalonia, Pere III (1336-1387), his son Joan I (1387-1395) and Martí I (1396-1410). Martí I left no living heir so an interregnum ensued in 1410, lasting two years and involving much maneuvering with “Fernando de Antequera of the Catalan House of Trastàmaras elected king at the Compromise of Casp in 1412.” When he died in 1414, his son Alfons IV (1416-1458) came to the throne, ruling till 1458. The marriage of Ferdinand II and Isabella of Castile unofficially dated at 1469, was the beginning of Aragón-Catalonia’s merger with Castile and the emergence of the core of the new nation of Spain.
And the scriptwriters were busy eulogizing the feats of warriors and state-sponsored piracy. In their tales, self-aggrandizement was defined as an honorable and chivalrous adventure, even as a religious calling. Pirates were clothed in the raiment of do-gooderism. The Argo-Catalans organized a “coalition of the willing” among mercenaries from other nations and “real” Catalan pirates in their domination of several Mediterranean island communities. Some of these were mercenary groups wherein Catalan was the lingua franca and others were pretenders to the Crown of the island in question. There was much at stake. Some of the main financial backers of Crown involvement in the conquest of Sicily, for example, were corn dealers from Catalonia who hoped to conquer enough of the corn-producing areas of the Mediterranean to create monopolistic control of the corn market.

This poleconomic aggrandizement was romanticized in Catalan literature. One such laudatory chronicle (Tirant lo Blanch ) concerning external raids was written by Ramon Muntaner (1265-1336) who participated in the campaigns in the East. The book is partly based on the exploits of Roger de Flor, who commanded the Gran Companyia Catalana (Catalan Company) and the infamously brutal Almogaver mercenaries in their exploits in Constantinople. This commander was glorified in his success there, being named “Mega-Duke and later Caesar,” in what surely had to be an inflation in congratulatory terms. However, the Catalan Company was successful in defending Constantinople against the Turks, acquiring “immense booty” in the process.
Such writing exalted military exploits, piracy, imperialism and violence e.g., the brutal assassination of Roger de Flor and his aides and the retaliatory assault by his remaining captains in what became famously known as the Venjança Catalana (Catalan Vengeance). The Catalans went on to conquer the duchy of Athens, which they made into their headquarters from which they launched a successful attack on the duchy of Neopatria. “As late as 1348 they ruled Attica, Boeotia, and Thessaly until finally dispossessed by the Lord of Corinth in 1388.” In these chronicles the warlike escapades of the Catalans are elevated to heroic dimensions.


State Piracy

State piracy took place in the Mediterranean arena, where individual piracy was rampant. Furthermore, personal piracy overlapped with “official” duties of the state.

Piracy for individuals was an opportunity that lay not too far out of bounds in early Catalonia. We can see this in the case of Count Pons Hugh de Ampurias, who lived between 1277-1313. He sometimes cooperated with the Count of Barcelona, at others was at odds with him and eventually, in 1311, was accused in a Barcelona court of being a sodomite. This was a terrible accusation, since sodomy, which covered all possible illicit sexual contact between males, was thought to be so heinously unnatural that it was seen to be the source of earthquakes, famine, pestilence and the like. Accusations of sodomy for men, as with witchcraft imputations against women, were convenient political weapons for example, the charges of sodomy brought against the Knights Templar in 1307 when the French King wished them disbanded, an action reluctantly agreed to by Jaume II of Aragón (1291-1327).

It so happened that Count Hugh Pons was one of the few nobles who supported the Knights Templar in their fight to survive the political accusations coming from the papacy and Philip IV of France (1285-1314). From this crisis on, Pons was on the outs with King Jaume, a conflict that reached a breaking point in 1293 when the king began to construct several fortifications near the Ampurias border, while refusing to allow Pons to do likewise on his side. This was coupled with many minor poleconomic squabbles and the ongoing interference of the count-king in the affairs of the country of the Ampurias.

When things got hot in officialdom, piracy was always an option. By 1309 Pons had had enough. He appointed his son, Malgauli, to be his heir and went off to become a merchant-pirate in the Mediterranean. He had been an admiral in the Catalan-Argonese navy and apparently had five galleys that he had used in “legitimate” service of the king. Now, as a private pirate, he put them to personal use.

In his piracy he angered the pope and the Venetians by attacking their merchant ships. They complained to Jaume, who was seen as responsible for this wayward count. Pons was also said to have traded with the Saracens, but this was common and appeared to be a trumped up charge.

At this point, the count-king of Barcelona accused Pons of stealing the five galleys from the royal navy. Pons was ordered to appear before a formal tribunal and Barcelona assured the Venetian legislature that the king had attacked Pon’s castles, burning one. If convicted, Pons could no longer have been a count and would have lost his political rights as a noble, forfeiting any property, which Barcelona could then confiscate. At this point, the other barons of Catalonia turned against Pons and supported the king. However, the case hung in the air, as it seems that Pons never returned to stand trial, remaining a pirate for the rest of his life.

Private piracy overlapped with and evolved into state piracy and legitimate trade. Professor O’Callaghan says that in the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276) “the Catalans, after initially profiting from piracy against Tunisian ships, developed more legitimate commercial relations with Tunis and established merchant colonies there. [The king] encouraged this, as it was a source of wealth for the crown as well as for his subjects, and from time to time the emirs sent him gifts of money as a sign of their friendship” [my insert].

In a suggestive manner, the payment of this tribute laid a foundation for imperialist ventures by future kings. Pere II (1276-1285) followed his father, Jaume the Conqueror (1213-1276), to the throne and interpreted the gifts of the emirs of Tunis as regular tribute. They were defined as payments to be made on a customary and ongoing basis. Spontaneous gifts had become regularized tribute. Some of the Moorish leaders balked at this and others betrayed the Iberians in their attempts to place puppet emirs in power. Such rebels were rewarded with violent raids, the exercise of Sword Power.

Tribute was often put to use by adventurers who lived raucous lives. As was the custom in Catalonia, the Barcelonese conquerors of Majorca threw lavish banquets as a way of broadcasting success in plunder and garnering social status. Fernández-Armesto says:

Theirs was a world of status linked to consumption, measured in costly feasts and ostentatious displays of loyalty to the mainland dynasty. At least seventy-six craftsmen and decorators were employed – some Moors, some Greeks a few specifically slaves – to adorn the city chambers for the banquets. Two “painters of altarpieces and battle flags” decorated hangings to celebrate the obsequies of the mainland queen. And large sums spent on defense against the pretensions of the extruded island dynasty included the pay of eleven surgeon-bargers to serve the fleet. A society so abundantly supplied with quacks and craftsmen must have wallowed in surplus wealth (1992:50).

Piracy was not defined as a bad thing if they were your pirates. The Barcelona Count-King, Jaume I (1213-1276) was forthcoming about the role of the state in banditry. In his autobiography, Book of Deeds, the monarch revealed that he saw maritime war as a means of gallantry and adventure, a romantic exercise in chivalric deed par excellence. In this book, the count-king elevated maritime banditry perpetrated by the government over and above land-based exploits. He romanticized seagoing with exaggerated rhetoric. Fernández-Armesto hints that perhaps the monarch sensed a little known “honor” among the “rats and hard-tack of shipboard life.” He glorified the crushing of Majorca, Sicily and the other areas conquered in the Mediterranean, relishing in the renown these victories brought to him personally, to the Crown and to Catalonia. His writing displayed a dark sense of dynastic destiny. He gloried in imperialism, blessed it because it was being perpetrated by the church and hyped it as a means of poleconomic advancement for Catalonia. In other words, state piracy was portrayed as beneficial to Aragón-Catalonia by a king acting as a spindoctor or one who spins a tale for personal aggrandizement.

Élites, from the development of the first surpluses angled to find ways to fabricate institutions that gave them power to impose exactions on the populace. In Medieval Catalonia this was done by blatant falsification of documents giving the landlords the legal right to enslave the peasants. In Bornu there were similar exactions based on unequal power. The Emir of Bornu was accustomed to giving special rights of taxation to nobles who wished to set up residence in the capital city or who had provided him with outstanding service of some sort. The élite man could then take a band of warriors, go to the area designated by the monarch and demand or take by force of arms as much as he could exact from the locals. Greedy nobles could leave an area devastated, taking livestock, crops and even enslaving the people. If he was feeling especially generous he could only take half, but could return to his fief in the future and demand gifts. If they were not forthcoming he could severely punish rebellious and recalcitrant individuals and families (Cohen 1991:120-121). This was behavior very similar to the bullying done in Medieval Catalonia by the tax collectors of the monarch of Barcelona, as well as local landlords who merely took it upon themselves to demand gifts from peasants, always accompanied by his knights and their swords (Mendonsa 2008). When the count’s taxmen were harassing the people, they did so under the guise of officialdom; when the local barons browbeat folks it was based on cultural mores and codes that had grown up over the centuries giving special rights to those armed men on horseback, known by various handles – caballeros, chevaliers or, from the standpoint of the oppressed – malandros. The former used formal codes (state laws) and the latter used informal codes, but the result was the same: the surplus flowed uphill to the castles of the élites. Furthermore, the horsemen riding off to plunder under the flag of the Emir of Bornu would have felt right at home in the band of thugs taking property and livelihood from the weak of the countryside in Medieval Catalonia. Both would probably understand the motivations of modern-day thieves like Bernie Madoff and the bloodsuckers of Enron. These contemporary crooks also used legitimate institutions for their personal aggrandizement. Whether the state or financial institutions or corporations, aggrandizers from the beginning of history have figured ways of fiddling the books or fabricating new rules to unduly benefit them and theirs

[I might hesitate to put such a comment as this last one in an academic book, but that is the beauty of a blog. It is relatively informal, so I put it in, largely because we need to understand that history has lessons for us. The lesson I am trying to get across is that, once created, political institutions can be used as corruption centers. This was true in ancient times and remains so today. Furthermore, the more distant the centers of poleconomic power are from the people, the less control they have over matters. It is easier to deal with matters in a city government than in a national one and, of course, with globalization we are headed for powerful institutions that are unreachable except by élites].

/./ÉLITE EXPLOITATION AND CITIES

In his well-known work on ancient cities, Sjoberg (1960) regarded them as political entities, a clustering of the ruling class and their servants and followers drawn together to make possible governance and rule. Others, such as Jacobs (1969) have describes cities, even imperial ones, as economic centers. Following Hassig (1985) I take a poleconomic approach i.e., both political and economic factors function to induce élites to construct a city and maintain its institutions. Trade and tribute are mutually exclusive. As functional alternatives, they provide overlords dual opportunities to enhance their royal coffer. Politicos use military might to exact tribute, but also regulate the market to their advantage. In either case, they are looking out for their own interests.

According to Rojas (1986:35) Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico began as a trade center but then became a city dominated by élite demonstrating a transition from trade to a later dependence on tribute. Nearby Xaltocan held regional importance during the 13th and 14th centuries. Its leaders established marriage relations with surrounding power centers and it held dominion over 49 towns, a considerable potential for enhancing the wealth of the overlords, according to Pablo Nazareo (1940). Goods received were live eagles and dried chilies (Barlow 1949) and large quantities of cotton and maguey-fiber textiles, bins of maize, elaborate feather embroidered warriors’ outfits, beans, amaranth and large jars of maguey syrup. These payments were the result of conquest and subjugation by the armies of Xaltocan overlords (Brumfiel 1991:181). Eventually the Xaltocan leaders lost their hegemony to invading Aztecs and they became tribute payers instead of tribute collectors, highlighting the strong relationship between the sword and the tax collectors purse.

/./ÉLITE EXPLOITATION IN EMPIRES

Empires feed on their neighbors and their people. Aggrandizers built power institutions at every level of social organization from early family-oriented villages to empires and nation states. The latter two are especially dominating, however, for two reasons: (1) they are big and the average individual is far removed for the powerful deal-makers of the society; and, (2) they have in history created the greatest killing machines, standing armies. Let's look at one empire as an example.

Professor Hicks notes that the Aztec Empire had one major objective: “to increase the proportion of the population whose prestations were forcibly extracted (1991:200).” He notes that prestations were of two kinds in the Aztec world: (1) gifts to those on high, which had the disadvantage of setting up the need for reciprocity or a counter-gift of some sort; and, (2) booty, those goods taken in war, which had the advantage of having no reciprocal strings attached. More often than not leaders set up their culture of domination as if it was benign, at the very least, and helpful at best. If subordinates were required to provide leaders with certain goods and services, then the ideal culture indicated that they would, at least, receive equal measure from their leaders in return. This was the great lie. Godelier (1978:767) noted this i.e., that relations of dominance and exploitation were most often portrayed as if they were exchanges of service. This was the cleverness of élites who constructed the first institutions of power: they made them look as if they were needed by the general population and served societal needs, not the needs and wishes of the leadership. A socially acceptable framework of domination was the glove on the fist of power.

Empires were, by nature, expansive. Their leaders wanted more territory, slaves and booty, all of which enhanced the prestige of the emperor and his domain. History tells us that the appetites of emperors were, on the whole, insatiable. According to the ideals of reciprocity in which such leaders clothed their acquisitiveness, they shouldn’t be takers, but rather takers and givers. The question remains: in history do we see leaders living up to the ideal or have they “eaten up” their neighbors and their own people? Barth (2009 [1857]) answered this for the Empire of Bornu by noting that in times of stress the leaders not only did not routinely help their own people, but preyed on them by hording food and then selling it back to the people once the price had risen sufficiently. Professor Cohen (1991) concurred that Bornu emirs and their noble followers often gouged their constituents, even browbeating them and stealing from them under the guise of “noble rights.” I documented the same for the élite of Medieval Catalonia (Mendonsa 2008). It is an old story to the reader of history.

What is important to note is that, on the whole, populations accept such overlords if they feel that they have no choice or it they think that they can operate within the dominating context sufficient to meet their needs. Also, if they feel they have recourse to push back when élites do not live up to noblesse oblige, according to James Scott (1987), non-élites will go along with élite domination. In a happy world the ideology of prestation exchange – you give me and I give back – means that the general population should meet their obligations without question. In turn, élites should reciprocate and not abuse this willingness of the masses to accept their overlordship i.e., there is no need for class antagonism.

States and empires usually operate on a tributary mode of production (Amin 1978; Wolf 1982). In this system the surplus is transferred from producers to the top people in the hierarchy mainly by political means. The very top leaders live off the prestations of the people, either directly (Asiatic Mode of Production) or through local élites (Feudal Mode of Production).

The Aztec Empire was closer to the Feudal Mode of Production in that land, the main means of production was land and it remained in the hands of local élites. Tribute flowed from them upwards to the apex of the hierarchy and the people forming the majority of the pyramid were locked in relations of dependency with the few at the apex. In the Aztec Empire, domination and subordination were often disguised as reciprocity, but in reality, in addition to gift exchange, leaders regularly extracted value from the less powerful by force (Hicks 1991:209).

I contend that this “disguise of reciprocity” was evident in the very nascent structures constructed by early sedentary foragers and early farmers, on the one hand; and all the way through history to nation states, on the other hand. Expansive empires would regularly conquer lands and subjugate the residents, but then establish an ideology of protection i.e., we have subdued you in order to protect you from even worse warlords.

/./POWER & PERCEIVED POWERLESSNESS

Let's think about two men, one in a non-storing hunting and gathering society in the Paleolithic and the other an underling in a bureaucratic organization, political or corporate, in the mass society of modern-day America. Then let's ask the question: Which one had more power to deal with an aggrandizer? In the Paleolithic band that aggrandizer might be a man who aspired to be a leader but did not conform to the ethos of community first and individual second, a pushy sort who wanted to boss everyone around. In the modern-day society, the aggrandizer might be a President, our modern aggrandizer, who is leading the country in a direction the non-élite man, our non-aggrandizer, feels is incorrect.

Let's compare the two non-aggrandizers with regard to power and powerlessness. In the Paleolithic case, the man offended by the arrogant and bossy aggrandizer had three options: (1) he could comply with the demands he felt to be overreaching and contrary to the communal ethos; (2) he might choose to leave the band and join another; or, (3) he could kill the offending man.

Now let's think about our modern-day situation. Does the modern man offended by his President’s policies have the same three options? Only option one, compliance, is easy in a mass society where political leaders are distant and well-protected by armed guards and security systems. In the Paleolithic case, the offending individual lives face-to-face with the offended individual, who could, with some foresight and planning, pick the offender off in the bush without others knowing. This would a much easier killing to bring off in Paleolithic times because of the lack of armed guards or security systems around the offending party and, furthermore, the offended man would have had access to the same lethal technology as the man he wanted to kill – a spear and/or a bow & arrow. The Paleolithic killer could murder his offender in secret much more easily than could be done in a mass society of today.

The second option open to the Paleolithic offended party, to leave the band, would not be easily open to the modern-day citizen offended by Presidential politics. While the Paleolithic man could not have been bound to the band by any rules; the modern individual is a legal citizen of a government-controlled nation and it is difficult to leave a nation officially, though the disgruntled citizen could live abroad as an ex-patriot, also a life-changing option. The Paleolithic man could more easily leave one band and join another and find cultural conditions that were more or less the same as in the previous band. In fact, in Paleolithic bands this was a common occurrence and individuals often lived in one community for a while then joined one or more different bands throughout his lifetime. Movement between communities was easy and had no legal impediments, as exist today.

With regard to the murderous option, the Paleolithic killer would be at least ostracized by the band if his murder was uncovered. There are ethnographic examples of murderers in hunting and gathering societies being themselves killed by the community, but given the simple technology, the lack of security systems surrounding the offending party and since individuals would periodically be required to go into the bush to fulfill bodily functions, as well as to hunt or forage for food, killing him would be far easier to effectuate and to cover up.

This brings us to the concept of powerlessness. Clearly the modern-day man would feel far more powerless (or less powerful) than his Paleolithic counterpart. Indeed, we all know of cases where disgruntled individuals have tried to kill a sitting President, resulting in four fatalities – Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. The other five attempts failed. While a killer in a Paleolithic band could simply kill and leave to join another band, this option is not pragmatically open to the assassin of a U.S. President. Thus, most people who are upset by a given President simply must tolerate his political control of their lives in a modern-day society. Ipso facto, they will feel greater powerlessness.

What does this comparison teach us? It indicates that obedience to élite authority is far greater or much more necessary in the modern context than in the Paleolithic world of non-storing hunter-gatherers. Powerlessness would have increased in storaging Paleolithic societies, where chiefs became powerful rulers and in the case of the Northwest Coast Amerindians, for instance, slavery was institutionalized.

Obedience to élite authority would also have increased and, concomitantly, so would have powerlessness, in early Neolithic societies that developed powerful chieftaincies. This was because chiefs, Paleolithic or Neolithic, developed cadres of underlings whose job it was to protect the leader. Of course, as both Julius Caesar and
Indira Gandhi found out, sometimes it is difficult to protect yourself from your protectors, but in most cases chiefs, kings and emperors, as well as modern-day Presidents and Prime Ministers, are well protected from dissatisfied citizens. Thus, obedience to politicos’ policies is a requirement of citizenship and if one feels powerlessness, so be it.

No doubt protecting political leaders had some benefit to society. Gifted and socially conscious leaders would be able to rule in ways that were beneficial to society and stability would have been the result. But protecting tyrants would also have brought a semblance of stability, but would have elevated discontent and a growing sense of powerlessness in the public. As chiefs were superseded by kings and they, in turn, gave way to emperors, rebellion and revolution became increasingly remoter possibilities for the disaffected in society. Security grew and the palace guard became a common institution used by monarchs and popes alike. Today the Grenadier Guards of Queen Elizabeth and the Pontifical Swiss Guards are, to an extent, window dressing with added protection coming from electronic security systems, bullet proof automobiles, etc. These systems usually protect the leader, unless the individual chooses not to use them, as in the case of Benazir Bhutto when she stood up through the sunroof of her armored vehicle and exposed herself to an assassin.

The invulnerability of political leaders that has grown throughout history’s timeframe has meant that both effective and ineffective, as well as altruistic and tyrannical, leaders are well insulated from angry citizens. That “throwing the bums” out has become so difficult surely has raised the degree of frustration and powerlessness in society and in modern-day America, a so-called democracy, where voter turnout has historically only been in the 50% to 60% range many people shake their heads at leaders and go about the business of consuming. The really disaffected are limited to railing on talk shows or taking to the mountains to effetely play at being revolutionaries.

This means the élite deviance and political malfeasance have become more or less unstoppable by way of assassination or revolution. Incensed citizens are largely left with option one in our hypothetical comparison of Paleolithic Man with modern-day Man.

/./SACRED RULE

Once the environment enabled the production of a surplus, aggrandizers moved to secure the surplus and did so by building institutions of authority e.g., chiefdoms and priesthoods. This collaboration between rulers and priests or shamans is an old one, going back to the commencement of complex institutions. Becker (1979) called it the Priest-Peasant archetype. Stored wealth not only fell under political and military protection but also that of the shamans and priests. Politicos often acted in concert with religious leaders or priests, as we see in the case of the Yakut-Mono Amerindians of California, where little chiefs and shamans collaborated to extract surplus value from their fellow sedentary foragers. This collaboration between religious élites and politicos continued through the building of empires and today in industrialized societies is only seen in vestiges of “In God we trust” traces of sacred rule. Of course, al-Qa’ida is still trying to institute a theocratic state, but most modern societies have moved away from what served overlords for so long, sacred rule.

Ploeg (1991:211) made the salient point that it is futile to separate the economic from the sacred, military and political function of élites in power or to try to assign an order of priority to one of these factors. Put another way, early aspiring rulers sought to conceal their poleconomic intentions, that they wanted power for power’s sake or that they wanted to use power positions to secure more wealth for themselves and their disciples. A blanket of sacredness was an ideal solution. Going to the mount and returning with commandments takes some of the sting out of them.

In ancient Egypt their mythology indicated that kingship was rooted in the Divine. According to their emic point of view, the God named Re was the original ruler of Egypt, then his direct rule gave way to rule by “semi-divine spirits,” which in turn gave way to rule by the first human ruler, Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty ca. 5, 100 YBP (Frankfort 1978:15). He is credited with uniting Upper Egypt with Lower Egypt, thus creating a unified Egyptian monarchy. Such linkage between the gods and human monarchs is common to the foundation myths of kingdoms. Such myths have a unifying influence on disparate groups and function to create monarchical rule.

In India, too, divine rule by kings has always been accepted by the masses (Gonda 1956:36). This linkage between the Divine and political rule is, of course, useful in a state where religious beliefs are strong. In Africa, too, divine kings are known e.g., among the Igbo of modern-day Nigeria (Jeffreys 1935). The Umundri Igbo actually have two divine kings thought to be descendants the first divine king who was inaugurated by a sky-being named Eri, who was sent down to earth by Chiuku, the sun-god. It should be noted that the jump from those early and simple societies practicing ancestor-veneration to divine kingship is not a major transition. In the ancestor-venerators I studied in Northern Ghana, for example, the lineage and clan heads all have shrines that connect them to the occult world and, in part, their rule within their lineages and clans is made legitimate by this linkage to the Divine. In their cosmology their sky-creator-god is a distant being who does not get involved in human affairs beyond his initial creative acts and day-to-day affairs on earth are handled by the ancestors (Mendonsa 1976, 1977, 1978). In divine kingdoms, the monarch is simply a centralization of spiritual authority that is disseminated among family and clan heads in acephalous societies. God’s authority is superior to that of the ancestors, just as the king’s authority supersedes that of the various lineages and clans in his territory. The symbolism reflects actual power and authority within the suzerainty of the king. Just as the focus of the headmen of lineages and clans is on the ancestors who take an active interest in their dealings and relationships, in the divine kingdom the high god is thought to take over that responsibility just as the king has taken on the role of supreme protector of the larger polity, comprised of sub-groups of lineages and clans, each with a less-authoritative headman – again, just as the high god has subservient spiritual beings to carry out his orders. Furthermore, among the Umundri Igbo the authority of the high god is not divorced from that of the ancestors, for the king is selected by the ancestors, who are consulted through divination and make their selection known to their living descendants. Just as god operates in one level of authority above the ancestors, but in concert with them; the king operates above, but in conjunction with, the headmen of lineages and clans.

Both political systems, the ancestor cult and the kingdom, share the common belief that there is a realm of life beyond the visible world, the occult realm of gods and spirits. Connecting the occult realm with politics is not, however, restricted to acephalous simple societies or kingdoms. For example, mystical ideas permeate the politics of some modern-day nation states, as reported by Peter Geshiere for postcolonial Africa (1995). Ancient kings are not the only ones who find linkage to the supernatural to be helpful in political dealings.

Throughout history political leaders have actively attempted to control development (Claessen, & Peter van de Velde 1991:5) and, in so doing, they were able to extract value for themselves and their close associates, building a poleconomic power base. The stronger that base became, the greater amount of wealth they were able to stuff into their own pockets. One clear way of covering their tracks in such skullduggery was to claim sacred backing. Historically churches have arise that have done the same thing i.e., filled their collection plates with enough lucre to become as powerful as any extractive state. The sacred blanket is a useful cover for duplicity.

Of course one of the most blatant examples of sacred rule is “The Divine Right of Kings” as concocted in medieval times (1992)..The theory became well known in England during the reign of King James I of England (1603–1625) and in France under the rule of King Louis XIV (1643–1715). It was a politco-religious doctrine of absolute royal sovereignty. It asserted that a ruler, mostly referring to European kings, was subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from God’s will. The sovereign was therefore not subject to the will of his people, nobles or any other estate of the realm, including the pope. Under this dogma, since only God could judge an unjust king, the king could not be held accountable for acts that would be criminal for others. The doctrine implied that any attempt to depose the monarch or to restrict his powers ran counter to divine will and would be considered heresy.

The dogma stated that just as God had given spiritual power and authority to the church, He had bestowed earthly power to the king. The doctrine postulated an overlap between secular rule and religious authority. The medieval source of the theory was Jean Bodin (1530-1596), who based it on the interpretation of Roman law, but the idea of the divine right to rule has appeared in many societies, Eastern and Western, going back to the first recognized god king, Gilgamesh, who may have been an actual Mesopotamian ruler in century BC or he could have been mythical, nevertheless, the idea of an overlap between sacred and secular power goes back in written records to The Epic of Golgamesh. One would expect that it was, however, one of the first ideas that aggrandizers came up with to cover their self-seeking behavior as they formulated early institutions of power.

The earliest linkage between secular rulers and those claiming some connection to the supernatural, with great likelihood, was that between aspiring chiefs a.k.a. little chiefs and shamans. Ethnographies, ethnohistorical writings and history books are full of examples of this association i.e., between rulers and oracles, diviners and shaman. It was not uncommon for early chiefs to have control over special spots that were considered sacred, often being hills or mountains, but sometimes sacred groves.

I have shown how lineage headmen use divination to bolster their authority (Mendonsa 1982) and chiefs, which were instituted by the British after 1906 (Mendonsa 1975), quickly adopted public shrines portrayed by them as having occult powers. The first paramount Sisala chief resident in Tumu passed himself off as a shaman, claiming magical powers in addition to the colonial authority he derived from the British. It worked. When he died, some people did not come to the funeral because they could not believe that he was capable of dying. If someone didn’t like one of his political decisions, they could go complain to the British District Commissioner, but it was very difficult to find an occult entity so easily accessed. The great shrine in the chief’s outyard, the Tumuwihiya, is still there and in use. Any person who comes with a court case for adjudication by the chief may have to swear an oath on that shrine and if he is telling an untruth, it is said that the shrine, or the occult forces behind it, will kill the liar.

Resorting to supernatural sanctioning of deviants does not always work, but it is good to try it because there is always a chance that it will appear to work and those cases will be remembered, especially when the politicos play them up and the negative cases will be more readily forgotten. When I last went to Sisalaland in 1998, they were still talking about a man I knew who swore on the Tumuwihiya, and shortly thereafter died. It was tantamount to what lawyers in our society call a legal precedent.

/./LITTLE CHIEFS

Julian Steward writes of the Northern Paiute Amerindian little chiefs, “The chief was succeeded by his son, provided he were (sic) intelligent, good, and persuasive. Otherwise a brother or some other member of his family, or even an unrelated person who was assured of popular support, succeeded him” (1938:56). Again, writing about the Shoshoni little chiefs: “A chief’s authority was consequently of uncertain scope and duration and depended largely upon his persuasiveness” (1938:251). In complexity little chiefs are one step above an organizer in a non-storer band of foragers, not governing simply by influence, as leaders of a hunting and gathering band do, but also not having the security of a tenured, chiefship with full-blown authority. They are embryonic chiefs.

/./SHAMANS

In several of the ethnographies of early storaging foragers we see the rise of a dual leadership, power being shared between the little chief and a shaman. However, among the Northern Maidu of California, who were storaging hunting and gathering people, the shaman was the most powerful individual who, through divination, determined who would be chief and he could depose an unpopular chief (Dixon 1905:223). His word was more feared and respected than that of the chief (1905:267). The shaman was held in awe because of the nature of his calling, which often happened while in the wilds where he had an encounter with the supernatural animal and fell into a trance. If a young man, he told no one of his encounter but the spirit animal, or familiar, would visit him from time to time throughout his life until he was able to announce that he was a shaman. In another scenario, the man may have such an encounter with the occult underwater and if unconscious when found was revived by chants and attendance of shamans, who then declare that he had been called to be a shaman (1905:268).

The shaman was one of three notables: little chief, shaman and headman of the secret society, although in time of war, a war leader was sometimes was chosen, but if not the head of the secret society led the war party. In addition to little chiefs, shamans, these foraging storers developed rudimentary complexity in the form of a concept of territoriality, a secret society, a simple ranking system and warfare. Lacking large runs of salmon or maritime foodstuffs, their storage was limited and their social structure in its nascent stages of development, yet in the activities of their shamans we see an elementary form of office-holding and office-holders vying with each other for power, prestige and wealth.

The shaman had curative powers, using charms to rub on the sick person’s body and he also was thought to be able to suck out the illness (1905:266). A patient was left in the wilds outside the village to be cured. Informed as to the location of the patient, the shaman would approach the prostrate person on all fours growing as a wild animal would do. He then sucked out the poison thought to be making the person ill (1905:270). Notice that the shaman is associated with the wilderness, wild animals and the supernatural, all being outside of the domestic space of the village. This is a common counterpoint in shamanism, with the practitioner being of the wild and commoners being associated with village life.

The shaman had curing properties, functioned as a diviner but also was responsible to helping organize festivals. When one was planned, he would make “strings,” which were knotted strings, each knot representing a day. The strings told villagers and those in distant communities exactly how many days remained until the festival (1905:228). At funerals he, or the chief, would begin the mourning and end it by a set saying (1905:252-253).

Shamans could communicate with the dead and would occasionally see ghosts, which were considered fearful (1905:260). At times the shaman can call the ghosts or spirits of the dead to the dance-house in order to harness their machinations (1905:265). The shaman also had the duty to perform rites to stimulate rainfall (1905:266).

I have indicated that early aggrandizers sought such offices as a chief or shaman because there was some political and/or economic payoff in so doing. In the case of the Maidu shaman, this was clearly the case. He was feared and very powerful in village affairs and, when he was called on to kill an enemy he had to be highly paid (1905:269). It was thought that if he touched a person with his hollow stick filled with medicine or even if the shaman’s shadow fell on an intended victim, the person was hexed. After the hex was in place, the shaman would go to the river, bathe and call on occult powers to kill the victim. The shaman’s position in society was, then, very desirous to hold and in some parts of Maidu country, especially the foothills region of the Sacramento Valley foothills, the position became hereditary.

Shamans were mostly men, with a very few female practitioners (1905:269). While most foraging societies looked down upon competition, the Maidu shamans were very competitive with one another, holding a dance contest, from time to time, wherein they competed with one another. After fasting and thought to be in possession of strong magic the shamans would meet in a public dance and attempt to harm, by magical means, their fellow shamans. The dance would continue until only one shaman was left standing, the others having become exhausted and supposedly negatively affected by the poison of the remaining dancer. He or she was declared the chief shaman (1905:272-274).

/./THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

First a note about evolution as a paradigm. It is a testament to the lack of education in the American public that according to a 2009 Gallup poll, only 39 percent of Americans believe in evolution and another 36 percent have no opinion as to its truth. In spite of public ignorance anthropologists and biologists almost universally see Darwin’s ideas as having been overwhelmingly confirmed by decades of empirical proof. While only 53 percent of American college graduates believe in evolution, those with postgraduate degrees (in whatever field) show a 74 percent belief level and for those in fields that study evolution it would be almost 100 percent (Zimmer 2001). Furthermore, sociocultural evolution is on a par among scholars with a strong belief in biological evolution (Langton 1979).

Thus, evolution in circles educated to understand its complexity evolution, as well as sociocultural evolution, is a scientific paradigm (Kuhn 1970; Langton 1979). But evolution is not progressive in the sense of life getting better. There are bumps along the evolutionary road. Rather than being a smooth, continuous process, evolution is marked by abrupt, unsteady changes and sudden jumps in complexity (Froom 2004). It is marked by creative destruction (Schumpeter 1975; Sombert 2001) i.e., the emergence of complexity has costs. The price for extension and expansion in one dimension is often limitation and localization in another dimension. Creation, concentration and accumulation is possible because something else is subject to destruction, dissipation or dispersion, and the emergence of completely new species is usually accompanied by the mass extinction of older species. Complexity and its emergence are inextricably linked to catastrophes and extinctions.

For our subject, we can see that sociocultural evolution jumped, rather dramatically, from a long era of egalitarianism to a more complex social world in which go-getting men were able to form institutions and rules that brought about poleconomic hierarchy. The old communitarianism of the almost endless expanse of the Paleolithic was quickly and abruptly replaced by a world of control by achievers, a value on individualism, ranked societies, private property, political offices and economic insecurity for the less fortunate in society. In a more general sense, the world became a less secure place because of the division of groups into haves and have-nots and the consequent warfare that developed.

With stored wealth, there not only developed social classes, but the nature of gender relations was dramatically altered. The old attempts at maintaining some semblance of gender equality quickly fell way and women became “comodified” i.e., their labor was now no longer complementary to men’s work but rather was a value that, if controlled, could augment the incomes of acquisitive men. Women became doubly valuable in that they could reproduce workers and followers for big men and they could also work before, during and after pregnancies for those very men. It is at this time in history, ca. 13 thousand YBP that we see the implementation of patriarchy and polygyny as institutions supportive of the rise of aggrandizer men.

Evolution is adaptive change and it is not necessarily good or bad, in some abstract moralistic sense, but rather is fit and functional for a specific environment, in this case, an ecology and economy where men could accumulate a surplus of food, store it and use that wealth to their advantage in building complex structures e.g., chiefdoms. We have many good historical and ethnographic examples of this. Some of them I have discussed include the Chumash and the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast. These were storing foragers living at the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic and, of course, once agriculture and pastoralism were developed, complexity accelerated even faster, with kingdoms and empires emerging to gobble up less complex peoples through expansive warfare.

Another evolutionary process was the shift from collectivism, emphasis on the group over the individual, to individualism, the rise of ideas about personal achievement, even those that would seem selfish to most non-storing foragers of the Paleolithic. As aggrandizers formulated their new cultural ideas and social structures, it could be that the actual brains of individuals were altered so that, over time, generations of individuals would not see individualism as selfish or anti-social, but would see it as normal. Be clear: I am not saying this was the intent of aggrandizers, but rather that brain functioning could have been a by-product of their social engineering. There is evidence of such changes coming out of the new science called cultural neuroscience (Chiao 2009). The data show that culture alters neural processes and the way a brain works is influenced by the language ones grows up speaking and the cultural surroundings of one’s life. Thus, it would seem that as new institutions and ideas were evolving, the brain would also be changing so that individuals could accommodate such changes. Whereas in the very first stages of the foundation of a chiefship the activities of the chief might seem abnormal, even deviant; in time, with brain modifications, people would become more amenable to the institution of chiefship. This alteration of neural functions would be consistent with what we see in history, where there has been a more or less continuing march from acephalous societies to those with headmen, little chiefs, titleholders or big men, chiefs, kings and emperors.

So we can see that society has evolved in a direction that has altered society so that its organization benefits a few disproportionately in terms of wealth and power. This is because it was possible, once a storable surplus of food could be captured or produced, aggressive men moved to fabricate rules and rule structures to harness human labor and to secure a large portion of the surplus for themselves.

/./MODERN-DAY DEVIANCE BY ÉLITES

In the early storaging Paleolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher societies that had élite leaders and in the subsequent societies of the early Neolithic leadership became an accepted fixture of society. The members of society must have become accustomed to leaders who expected perquisites of office and this acceptance of leaders’ deviance from the norms of communalism must have taken place over time. Individualism, private property held by leaders and a general acquisitiveness on their part must have taken place over many generations. Once in place, however, political officers had to be tolerated, even if they misbehaved from time to time. It was easier to “throw the bums out” in simple face-to-face societies, where weapons with the same level of lethal impact were held by officers and their opponents; but as the centuries went by and chiefship grew into kingship and mighty and powerful emperors took vast swaths of land and controlled millions of people, it became far more difficult to get rid of tyrants.

In our modern-day society in America it is almost impossible. Only Richard Nixon was successfully forced from the office of the Presidency and many congressional leaders violate the rules buy remain in power (Simon 2002). Both Presidents who have been impeached, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, were acquitted, as were the vast majority of federal officials, mostly judges, who faced such public embarrassment. The point is: it is extremely difficult to get rid of leaders in the vastness of modern-day political structures. This is the case even though in the United States public opinion polls have shown that members of congress are held in lower esteem than used-car salesmen and prostitutes (Simon & Hagen 1999:50-54). It is today a common topic of discussion at cocktail parties outside the beltway to “dis” the President and other federal officials, especially members of the Senate and the U.S. Congress. Yet disgust with one’s leaders is something very different from being able to eject them from power.

There are many deviant acts and crimes committed by our officers in Washington D C and throughout the federal government e.g., the taking of illegal monies while in office. David Simon in his book ÉLITE DEVIANCE (2002:3) notes that “both Republicans and Democrats routinely accept all kinds of questionable and sometimes illegal contributions from foreign corporations and governments.” The same could be said for monies taken from American sources. About all that can be said in their defense is that the U.S. government is not as corrupt as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But there is a big difference between disliking government officials who are involved in deviance and being able to expel them from power.

Big business fairs no better than our government in the public’s eyes. Both business and the government have been slipping in public opinion polls since the end of World War II. By 1979, big business was tied with Congress as being “least trusted” from a list of ten major institutions (Opinion Roundup 1979:31). The reader of this blog is most likely well-read and aware of current affairs, so I do not need to belabor the fact that big business is seen as corrupt and not to be trusted by the U.S. public. There are many examples of this from the marketing of the Ford Pinto that company officials knew was defective (Balkan et. al. 1980:170) to the Enron debacle, in which company leaders have been convicted of lying under oath and criminal behavior while at Enron (Swartz & Watkins 2004). Of course shenanigans and crime in both government and big business have not ceased, as the Toyota scandal going on at this writing shows, as does the several investigations of political leaders in the U.S. Congress and the recent indictment of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges. Without better transparency élite deviance will continue, of that we can be confident. Why? Because, as with the early societies I have written about, aggrandizers will be aggrandizers. They will seek power, prestige and property. And when in power, they will either fiddle the rules or avoid them to access even more power, prestige and property.

/./THE OFFICE AS SHIELD

Scott & Hart (1979:40) discuss the concept of “the shield of élite invisibility.” This refers to organizations being shrouded in secrecy, so that deviance within is hard for outsiders to discern. This is because officers in organizations, government or corporate, have control over information. Their concept refers to modern-day organizations, however in THE FABRICATION OF DOMINATION I discussed a similar concept – that of the “shield of office.” I wrote:

Using the techniques of scripting false information for the public and developing other forms of mystification, office-holders through history have created a shield of office that allows them to manipulate the stated intent of office, its official reason for existing. Behind closed doors, under the camouflage of office, office-holders in our empirical cases will attempt to hoodwink their followers and engage in personal aggrandizement and activities that benefit their small cadre of family, friends and advisors. In a more general sense, the few feed at the trough at the expense of the many (2008a:17).

If this were a case of a few bad apples – well, apples die; but the problem for society is that rule changes made by manipulating office-holders in one generation get passed on to the next and newcomers to office find a set of norms that are beneficial to them and the normal course of history in this regard tends toward office-holders accepting the favorable set of rules and even expanding official regulations and perks to their further favor.

Rules, norms, structures, regulations, policies, conventions laws, standards and practices are information and office-holders and their staffs rarely want to share information with the public or relinquish the perquisites attached to office. Secrecy in some cases can even be internal to an organization e.g., the CEO of Gulf Oil during the 1970s withheld information about the company’s illegal payments in the course of doing business from his own Board of Directors (Simon 2002:38). A more well-known case is the Watergate affair (1972-1974) during which President Richard Nixon and some of his staffers withheld information from not only the public, but also from other members of the White House staff and from government officials who they feared might act against them should the information become public, which is what happened in the end.

It is a truism that knowledge is power and secret knowledge is powerful information. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information in office sometimes occurs behind camouflaging efforts of office-holders and their staffs. The idea behind this, and there is some validity to it, is that transparency in office reduces the power of the office-holder. This was perceived by the earliest office-holders in storaging societies of the Paleolithic and in the early centuries of the Neolithic and it continues to be “unofficial” wisdom of office-holders today.

The flak screens and spin put out by officials, both in corporations and government, are often innocuous, but they can be shields behind which tyrannous or seditious acts take place. There may even be a sense held by office-holders that it is in the best interests of the public not to have some information but, of course, not having that information prevents the public in a dictatorship or democracy, to draw a line as to what is acceptable behavior by officials and what is not. This issue was recently raised at the level of the Federal Government in the Bush Administration (2001-2009) with regard to that administration’s handling of secrecy in its “war on terrorism,” the “preemptive” war in Iraq, where the administration claimed it had verifiable information about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in that country, which gave the Bush Administration the legal right to invade a sovereign country. It became apparent to many critics of the President that this war and many violations of international law were dangerous acts on the part of the White House and many have come to feel that they damaged America’s stature in the world and perhaps made the USA less safe, while claiming to do just the opposite.

These are controversial issues and the ultimate right or wrong in these matters is being debated at the moment by pundits and historians. My interest in them lies in the fact that they illustrate a principle in my theory i.e., that office-holders and their staffs manipulate and withhold information, give it spin in the common parlance, often claiming that they are doing so for the good of the people they are in office to serve. They claim that opacity is the best policy because the job of the office-holder would be impaired by transparency.

In certain cases this is valid, for example in foreign affairs where diplomacy might be weakened by disclosure of some information; but in many cases it is not e.g., in the Enron case where manipulating information and withholding it from its stockholders led to the ruin of many lives. Presumably when the Gulf Oil Corporation admitted that it had made illegal political donations in Bolivia and Korea to further its business there and also made secret contributions to an Arab public relations effort in the USA, these revelations had ramifications for company shareholders, although they were not privy to that information (Anchorage Daily News, May 17, 1975:1). The list of such scandals is too numerous to list, but the point is that office provides protective armor behind which office-holders can operate in ways that might or might not be beneficial to other concerned parties, shareholders in the case of a corporation or the general public with regard to government actions.

A scandal in government or the business world has immediate effects e.g., a President is forced out of office or stockholders lose millions, but they can also have long-term results. Public confidence in the government of the United States and the actions of political and economic élites had drastically declines with revelations of élite deviance (Simon 2002:41). Furthermore, many criminologists indicate that deviance by such powerful individuals provides rationalization and motivation for non-élites to commit profit-oriented crimes (Thio 2009:85, 89). Also, élite deviance contributes to the persistence and growth of organized crime in the United States (Simon 2002: Chapter 2).

The greater the size of the organization the larger the possibility of élite deviance within (Simon 2002:38). Clearly, government has gotten bigger with time, as have corporations, since many that affect our lives today have globalized. Both government functioning and that of many giant corporations are very distant to any attempts at control by the average citizen or stockholder. The great leap to large organizations began with the development of large chieftaincies and kingships centuries ago was accelerated by the industrial revolution and now it has been exacerbated by globalization. With emerging world bodies of governance such as the IMF, World Bank and large poleconomic entities like the European Union

/./INHERITANCE, SUCCESSION TO OFFICE & CORPORATENESS

Without property beyond one’s own personal objects, which one could carry from camp to camp, among non-storing Paleolithic hunter-gatherers there was no need for rules of inheritance. It is logical that human beings would tend to give a man’s bow or a woman’s cooking utensils to the people closest to them upon their deaths, but beyond that tendency there was no need for formal rules pertaining to inheritance.

Once property in the form of storable wealth and the capital means of achieving that wealth, for example land for farmers or herds for pastoralists, came into existence the natural tendency to pass on one’s property to kin had to be formalized and rules of inheritance hardened.

Human beings can lust after property, but also after non-material means of achieving power, prestige and property e.g., offices in the political realm. Thus, in complex societies, as there developed rules of inheritance to deal with capital goods (wealth-generating property) there also developed in storing-foragers, farmers and herders rules of succession to important offices (Goody 1956) e.g., the headman of the family, chief of the group, shaman or head of the secret society.

Just as capital goods (e.g., prime fishing spots, land or herds) can bring a person power, prestige and more property; political or religious offices were capable of this and were, thusly, greatly sought after once society became complex. It seems likely that this occurred first as a coagulation of the tendency to see a family as a property-holding unit distinct from others in society, that is, the concept of the corporate group emerged as a coalescing around property (Goody 1976). When I was a student at Cambridge University in the 1970s there was an ongoing debate about whether corporate kin groups were just such groupings around a common interest in property, Goody’s position; or whether kinship was primal, Fortes’ position (1969). Since then anthropologists have largely swung in Goody’s direction and away from the essentialism of Fortes’ point of view.

In other words, once capital goods came into prominence in the economic life of folks, they developed rules of inheritance to cope with the biological reality of the eventual death of the property owner. Likewise, such rules were created to deal with the death of holders of important offices in society, which offices emerged, again, as a consequence of property i.e., office-holders had greater access to power and prestige and these intangibles gave them privileged access to more property than the average person in the group.

Rules of inheritance and those of succession to high office are linked. Take for example the Basoga of Uganda (Fallers 1956). They were, at the time of Fallers’ fieldwork there, a patrilineal society with chiefs. Fallers described three principles of social structure unifying Basoga society: (1) patrilineal descent; (2) ascribed rank and (3) patron-client relationship. Such rules developed in early farming societies like the Basoga to deal with property and political rule. Again, I believe that this likely developed first in families. In Basoga-land, for example, groups of lineage-mates were bound together by a corporate structure of authority – the lineage council comprised of the senior men of the lineage who functioned as its leaders. Fallers notes that they were also united by a common economic and religious interest in land and the ancestors (1956:126).

Many societies stopped there. Others developed another level of complexity atop the lineage structure – chiefship or the state. In Basoga-land the principle of ascribed rank set one patrilineal corporate lineage – that of the chief – above all others. Its male members were considered princes and were, by birth, assigned higher status, with an “in-born fitness to rule” (Fallers 1956:126).

That was the ideal model of Basoga rule, but in reality rulers faced the difficulties of actual rule. First of all, the chief would be surrounded in his descent group by princes who were all potential rivals and heirs to his office and he had to manage them accordingly. He did this through the third principle of social structure in Basoga life, the patron-client relationship. Rather than have a single prince as his replacement and thusly working closely with him to rule, the chief chose among able commoners to be his close advisors and administrators. To them he delegated authority to rule subdivisions of the state and, in so doing, diffused political authority beyond his rivals within the princes-in-waiting in the royal descent group. Furthermore, the chief cemented these patron-client relationships by establishing marriage ties with the descent groups of his client-advisor-rulers (Fallers 1956:127). Clearly, such rules were historically created to deal with the fact that men can be aggrandizers and lust after power, prestige and property and this yearning must be ameliorated by sets of rules.

In a way, the state in Basoga-land was an expanded version of the lineage, which was, in a real sense, the lowest level in the land’s state-type organization (Fallers 1956:128). Fallers’ writes:

At each level in the society corporate unilineal descent groups were involved in the structuring of authority relations … [and] the unilineal kinship structuring of authority was combined with the patron-client institution to produce the composite type of political structure …”

In other words, the state system was an expanded version of rule at the lineage level and the combination of chiefship and the patron-client institution, which was also used at the village level of political organization, was used to cope with men’s desires for access to power, prestige and property. Thus, in Basoga society, at the levels of lineage, village and state, the same rules applied, which were a combination of the idea of headmanship and the patron-client institution.

Of course, as societies grew more complex through time other principles of organization had to be formulated, but in its incipient state, no doubt the state had its model in the organization of the descent group in simple societies. Rules are created in societies to cope with problems of administering the scramble for control over property and office. In simple societies with lineage structures only, headmanship of the lineage is the highest level of political organization, though from time to time we find the emergence of cults and secret societies with their own headmen. These offices are, by definition, filled in most cases by aggrandizers and when a given aggrandizer sees opportunities to increase his power he schemes to create institutions to justify his privileged access to power, which is also an avenue to prestige and property. Since the organizational model of descent group authority was previously considered legitimate and functional, it was a good model to use in formulating early chiefships.

This is not to say that societies such as the Basoga were organized into a harmonious functional whole, but that “there is undoubtedly a tendency in this direction” (Fallers 1956:7). That is, there is a propensity toward organizing simple society’s various parts according to similar rules but as more complex problems come to confront rulers they often need to formulate new and unique means of organizing society. In any case, neither simple nor complex societies ever quite match their actual organization with the ideal model of how society should function. Social structures, as they develop over time, become riddled with contradictions – logical variance between rules – that create conflict between persons and groups of persons in their struggle to attain power, prestige and property (see Firth 1954 for a discussion about the difference between social structure as the ideal model and social organization as the actual way in which social structure is worked out by real actors). Both rules of inheritance and succession to high office are ideals that, from time to time in a society’s history, get abrogated in the real life struggle for power, prestige and property.

ΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨ
I will explore this in more detail from time to time. Contact me if you have questions or critiques of my theories. I welcome both. My email is docelm42@gmail.com
ΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨΨ

/./BIBLIOGRAPHY

//A
Abadinsky, Howard. 1994. ORGANIZED CRIME (Fourth edition). Chicago: Nelson Hall.

Adams, R. N. 1978. Man, energy and anthropology. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 80:297-309.

Adas, Peter N. et. al. 1992. The Agrarian Revolution and the Birth of Civilization. http://history-world.org/Agrarian%20Revolution.htm

Amin, Samir. 1978. ACCUMULATION ON A WORLD SCALE. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Amotz Zahavi & Avishag Zahavi. 1997. THE HANDICAP PRINCIPLE: A MISSING PIECE OF DARWIN’S PUZZLE. New York: Oxford University Press.

Anderson, D. G. 1994. The Savannah River chiefdoms: Political change in the late prehistoric southeast. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Annett, Joan, and Randall Collins. 1975. “A short history of deference and demeanor.” In: Randall Collins, CONFLICT SOCIOLOGY: TOWARD AN EXPLANATORY SCIENCE. New York: Academic Press.

Applegate, Richard B. 1975. The datura cult among the Chumash. JOURNAL OF CALIFORNIA ANTHROPOLOGY 2:1:7-17.

Archer, M. 1988. CULTURE AND AGENCY: THE PLACE OF CULTURE IN SOCIAL THEORY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ardrey, Robert. 1971. THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE. New York: Dell.

Arendt, Hannah. 1964. EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL. New York: Viking.

Arnold, Jeanne E. 1990. An archaeological perspective on the historic settlement pattern on Santa Cruz Island. JOURNAL OF CALIFORNIA AND GREAT BASIN ANTHROPOLOGY 12:1:112-127.

Arnold, Jeanne E. & Ann Munns. 1994. Independent or attached specialization: The organization of shell bead production in California. JOURNAL OF FIELD ARCHAEOLOGY 21:4:473-489.

Arnold, Jeanne. 2004. FOUNDATIONS OF CHUMASH COMPLEXITY. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Artemova, Olga. 2003. Monopolization of knowledge, social inequality and female status: A cross-cultural study. CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH 37:1:62-80.

Arnold, J. E. 1992. Complex hunter-gatherer-fishers of prehistoric California: Chiefs, specialists and maritime adaptations of the Channel Islands. AMERICAN ANTIQUITY 57:1:60-84.

//B
Baegert, Jacob S. J. 1863-1864. Account of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the California Penninsula. Translated and arranged by Charles Rau. Washington D C: Smithsonian Institution’s Annual Reports for 1893 and 1864. Reprinted in Carleton S. Coon (Ed.). 1960. A READER IN GENERAL ANTHROPOLOGY. New York: Holt.

Barkow, Jerome H. 1989. DARWIN, SEX AND STATUS. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

Barlow, Robert H. 1949. THE EXTENT OF THE EMPIRE OF THE CULHUA-MEXICA. (Ibero-Americana 28). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Barth, Heinrich. 2009 [1857]. TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES IN NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA. London: General Books.

Bartos, Otomar J. 2002. USING CONFLICT THEORY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bean, Lowell John & T. C. Blackburn (Eds.). 1976. NATIVE CALIFORNIANS: A THEORETICAL RETROSPECTIVE. Menlo Park, CA: Bellena Press.

Becker, M. J. 1979. Priests, peasants and ceremonial centers: The intellectual history of a model. In: N. Hammond & G. R. Willey (Eds.). MAYA ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOHISTORY. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 3-20.

Benedict, Ruth. 2006 (1934). PATTERNS OF CULTURE. New York: Mariner Books.

Bertelli, Sergio. 2001. THE KING'S BODY: SACRED RITUALS OF POWER IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Binford, Lewis R. 1990. Mobility, housing and environment: A comparative study. JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH 65:2:119-152.

Bogucki, Peter. 1990. THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIETY. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Bonta, Bruce D. 1996. Conflict Resolution among Peaceful Societies: The Culture of Peacefulness. JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, 33:4:403-420.

Bonnassie, Pierre. 1975-76. LA CATALOGNE DU MILIEU DU XE À LA FIN DU XIE SIÈCLE: CROISSANCE ET MUTATIONS D’UNE SOCIÉTÉ. (2 vols.). Toulouse: Publications de l’ Université de Toulouse – Le Mirail, ser. A, 23, 29.

Bonnassie, Pierre. 1980. Du Rhône à la Galice: Genèse et modalités du régime feudal. In: STRUCTURES FÉODALES ET FÉODALISME DANS L’OCCIDENT MÉDITERRANÉEN (XE-XIIIE SIÈCLES). Collection de l’ècole française de Rome 44:18-44.

Bonnassie, Pierre. 1991 FROM SLAVERY TO FEUDALISM IN SOUTHWESTERN EUROPE. (Trans. Jean Birrell). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boone, James L. 1998. The evolution of magnanimity: When is it better to give than to receive? HUMAN NATURE 9:1-21.

Brisch, Nicole. 2008. RELIGION AND POWER: DIVINE KINGSHIP IN THE ANCIENT WORLD AND BEYOND. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Box, Steven. 1983. CRIME, POWER AND MYSTIFICATION. London: Tavistock.

Brown, Robin C. nd. Human pre-history of Charlotte Harbor (Florida). http://library.fgcu.edu/chnep/9802-2.pdf

Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. 1991. Tribute and commerce in Imperial Cities: The case of Xaltocan, Mexico. In: Claessen & Peter van de Velde (Eds.). EARLY STATE ECONOMICS. London: Transaction, 177-198.

Brumfiel, E. M. & T. K. Earle. 1987. Specialization, exchange and complex societies: An introduction. In: Brumfiel, E. & T. K. Earle (Eds.). SPECIALIZATION, EXCHANGE AND COMPLEX SOCIETIES. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 1-9.

Burgess, Glenn. 1992. The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered" THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW 107:425:837-861.


//C
Carneiro, Robert L. 1988. The circumscription theory: Challenge and response. AMERICAN SCIENTIST 31:4:497-511.

Cashdan, Elizabeth A. 1980. Egalitarianism among hunters and gatherers. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 82:116-120.

Chiao, J.Y. (Ed.). 2009. CULTURAL NEUROSCIENCE: CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON BRAIN FUNCTION. New York: Elsevier Press.

Claessen, Henri J. M. & Peter van de Velde. 1985. The evolution of sociopolitical organization. In: Henri J. M. Claessen, M. E. Smith & Peter van de Velde (Eds.). Development AND DECLINE: THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIO-POLITICAL ORGANIZATION. Leiden: Brill, 1-12.

Claessen, Henri J. M. & Peter van de Velde. 1987. Introduction. Henri J. M. Claessen & Peter van de Velde (Eds.). EARLY STATE DYNAMICS. Leiden: Brill, 1-23.

Claessen, Henri J. M. & Peter van de Velde. 1991. Introduction. In: Claessen & Peter van de Velde (Eds.). EARLY STATE ECONOMICS. London: Transaction, 1-29.

Clinard, Marshall B. 1990. CORPORATE CORRUPTION: THE ABUSE OF POWER. New York: Praeger.

Cohen, Ron. 1971. Incorporation in Bornu. In: R. Cohen & J. Middleton (Eds.). From tribe to nation in Africa. Pittsburgh: Intext.

Cohen, Ron. 1991. Paradise regained: Myth and reality in the political economy of the early state. In: Claessen & Peter van de Velde (Eds.). Early state economics. London: Transaction, 109-129.

Crano, W. D. 1995. Attitude strength and vested interest. In: R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), ATTITUDE STRENGTH: ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 131-158.

Cushing, F. H. 1896. Exploration of ancient key dwellers’ remains on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 35:329-448.

//D
Dahlberg, Frances. 1980. Further Comment on Women's Status in Egalitarian Society. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 21:3:406-408.

Davis, Kingsley & Wilber E. Moore. 1945. Some principles of stratification. AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW 10:242-249.

Denig, Edwin Thompson. 1961. FIVE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UPPER MISSOURI. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Dickson, D. Bruce. 1990. THE DAWN OF BELIEF: RELIGION IN THE UPPER PALEOLITHIC OF SOUTHWESTERN EUROPE. Tuscan, Alizarin: University of Arizona Press.

Dietz, Thomas & T. R. Burns. 1992. Human Agency and the Evolutionary Dynamics of Culture. ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 35:3:187-200.

Dixon, Roland. 1905. THE NORTHERN MAIDU. New York: Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, XVII:III:119-346.

Dixon, Roland. 1948. The Northern Maidu. In: Carleton S. Coon (Ed.). A READER IN GENERAL ANTHROPOLOGY. New York: Holt, 263-292.

Douglas, Mary. 1966. PURITY AND DANGER: AN ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTS OF POLLUTION AND TABOO. London: Penguin.

Durkheim, Emile. 1933. THE DIVISION OF LABOR. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press.

//E
Earle, T. K. 1977. A reappraisal of redistribution: Complex Hawaiian chiefdoms. In: EXCHANGE SYSTEMS IN PREHISTORY. T. K. Earle & J.E. Ericson (Eds.). New York: Academic Press, 213-229.

Ember, Carol R. 1978. Myths about hunter-gatherers. ETHNOLOGY 17:439-448.

Ericksen, Karen Paige & Heather Horton. 1992. Blood feuds: Cross-cultural variations in kin group vengeance. BEHAVIOR SCIENCE RESEARCH 26:57-86.

Estioko-Griffin, Agnes, and P. Bion Griffin. 1981. Woman the Hunter: The Agta. In: Frances Dahlberg, (Ed.). WOMAN THE GATHERER. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 121-151.

//F
Fabbro, David. 1978. Peaceful societies: An introduction. JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH 15:1:67-83.

Fagan, Brian M. 1992. THE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH: AN INTRODUCTION TO WORLD PREHISTORY. New York: Harper.

Fallers, Lloyd. 1956. BANTU BUREAUCRACY. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Feeley-Harnick, Gillian. 1985. Issues in divine kingship. ANNUAL REVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY 14:273-313.

Fernández-Armesto, Filipe. 1992. BARCELONA: A THOUSAND YEARS OF THE CITY’S PAST. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fine, G. 1992. Agency, structure, and comparative contexts: Toward a synthetic interactionism, SYMBOLIC INTERACTION 15:1:87-107.

Finlay, Moses. 1981. Mycenaean palace archives and economic history. In: M. Finlay (Ed.). ECONOMY AND SOCIETY IN ANCIENT GREECE. London: Chatto & Windus, 199-212.

Firth, Raymond. 1954. Social organization and social change. JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY 84:1-20.

Firth, Raymond. 1966. MALAY FISHERMEN. New York: Norton.

Follett Mary Parker. 2009 [1918]. THE NEW STATE. New York: General Books.

Forde, C. Daryll. 1960. Primitive economics. In: Harry Shapiro (Ed.). MAN, CULTURE AND SOCIETY. Fair Lawn, NJ: Oxford Galaxy, 330-344.

Fortes, Meyer. 1969. KINSHIP AND THE SOCIAL ORDER: THE LEGACY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN. Chicago: Aldine.

Frankfort, Henri. 1978 [1948]. KINGSHIP AND THE GODS: A STUDY OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN RELIGION AS THE INTEGRATION OF SOCIETY AND NATURE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frembgen, Jürgen Wasim. 2004. The scorpion in Muslim folklore. ASIAN FOLKLORE STUDIES 63:1:95-123.

Fried, Morton. 1967. THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL SOCIETY. New York: Random House.

Froom, Jochen. 2004. THE EMERGENCE OF COMPLEXITY. Kassel: Kassel University Press.

//G
Gamble, Lynn H. 2008. THE CHUMASH WORLD AT EUROPEAN CONTACT: POWER, TRADE, AND FEASTING AMONG COMPLEX HUNTER-GATHERERS. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gaspari, Stefano. 2000. Kingship rituals and ideology in Lombard Italy. In: Theuws, Frans & Janet L. Nelson (Eds.). 2000. RITUALS OF POWER: FROM LATE ANTIQUITY TO THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. Leiden: Brill, 95-114.

Gayton, A. H. 1930. Yokuts-Mono chiefs and shamans.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS IN AMERICAN
ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY, 24:8:361-420.

Gayton, A. H. 1948. Yakuts and Western Mono Ethnography.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ANTHROPOLOGICAL RECORDS
10:1,2.

Geshiere, Peter. 1995. THE MODERNITY OF WITCHCRAFT: POLITICS AND THE OCCULT IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Gilmore, David D. (Ed.). 1987. HONOR AND SHAME AND THE UNITY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association.

Gluckman, Max. 2004 (1963). ORDER AND REBELLION IN TRIBAL AFRICA. London: Routledge (Reprint edition).

Godelier, Maurice. 1978. Infrastructures, societies and history. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 22:1-24.

Godelier, Maurice and Marilyn Strathern. 1991. BIG MEN AND GREAT MEN: PERSONIFICATIONS OF POWER IN MELANESIA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gonda, J. 1956. Ancient Indian Kingship from the Religious Point of View. NUMEN 3:1:36-71.

Goodale, Jane. 1971. TIWI WIVES. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Goodale, Jane, C.W.M. Hart & A. R. Pilling. 1987. THE TIWI OF NORTH AUSTRALIA. Florence, KY: Cenage Learning.

Goody, Jack. 1976. PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE DOMESTIC DOMAIN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goody, Jack (Ed.). 1966. SUCCESSION TO HIGH OFFICE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grant, C. 1965. THE ROCK PAINTING OF THE CHUMASH. Berkeley: University of California Press.

//H
Halperin, Rhoda. 1980. Ecology and mode of production: Seasonal variation and the division of labor by sex among hunter-gatherers. JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH 36:3:379-399.

Hanson, K. C. 1996. When the King Crosses the Line: Royal Deviance and Restitution in Levantine Ideologies. BIBLICAL THEOLOGY BULLETIN 26:11-25.

Harris, Marvin. 1974. COWS, PIGS, WARS AND WITCHES: THE RIDDLES OF CULTURE. New York: Random House.

Harris, Marvin. 1989. OUR KIND. New York: Harper & Row.

Harris, Marvin. 1993. The evolution of human gender hierarchies: A trial formulation. In: Barbara Diane Miller (Ed.). SEX AND GENDER HIERARCHIES. Cambridge: University Press, 57-80.

Hass, Jonathan. 2001. Warfare and the Evolution of culture. In: Gary M. Feinman and T. Douglas Price (Eds.). ARCHAEOLOGY AT THE MILLENNIUM. New York: Springer, 329-350.

Hassig, Ross. 1985. TRADE, TRIBUTE AND TRANSPORTATION: THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press.

Heizer, Robert F. & M. A. Whipple (Eds.). 1971 [1951]. THE CALIFORNIA INDIANS (second edition). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heizer, Robert F. & Albert B. Elasser. 1981. THE NATURAL WORLD OF THE CALIFORNIA INDIANS. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Herbst, Jeffrey. 2000. STATES & POWER IN AFRICA: COMPARTIVE LESSONS IN AUTHORITY AND CONTROL. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Herz, John H. 1957. Rise and demise of the territorial state, WORLD POLITICS 9:473-493.

Hicks, Frederic. 1991. Gift and tribute: Relations of dependency in Aztec Mexico. In: H. J. M. Claessen & P. van de Velde (Eds.) POLITICAL & LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY (VOLUME 8): EARLY STATE ECONOMICS. London: Transaction Publishers, 199-213.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1997 [1651]. LEVIATHAN. New York: Touchstone.

Hogbin, Ian. 1951. TRANSFORMATION SCENE: THE CHANGING CULTURE OF A NEW GUINEA VILLAGE. London: Routledge.

Holmberg, Allan. 1950. NOMADS OF THE LONG BOW: THE SIRIONO OF EASTERN BOLIVIA. Washington D C: Smithsonian Institution (Institute of Social Anthropology Publication No. 10).

Homan, Jacqueline S. 2009. DIVINE RIGHT: THE TRUTH IS A LIE. Lakewood, CO: ELF.

Hostetler, J. A. & G. E. Hunntington. 1967. THE HUTTERITES OF NORTH AMERICA. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston.

Hostetler, J. A. 1974. HUTTERITE SOCIETY. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

//I
Ingold, Tim. 1983. The Significance of Storage in Hunting Societies, MAN, (NS) 18:3:553-571

//J
Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1978. THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS: A HISTORY OF MESOPOTAMIAN RELIGION. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Jeffreys, M. D. W. 1935. The divine Umundri king. AFRICA 8:3:346-354.

//K
Kamakau, Samuel. 1961 (ca. 1871). Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii. Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press.

Keeley, L. H. 1996. WAR BEFORE CIVILIZATION. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kelly, Raymond C. 2005. The evolution of lethal intergroup violence. PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 102:43:15294-15298.
http://www.pnas.org/content/102/43/15294.full?&$NMW_TRANS$=ext

Kelly, Raymond C. 2000. WARLESS SOCIETIES AND THE ORIGIN OF WAR. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kelly, Raymond C. 2007. THE FORAGING SPECTRUM: DIVERSITY IN HUNTER-GATHERER LIFEWAYS. New York:Percheron Press.

King, Chester D. 1991. EVOLUTION OF CHUMASH SOCIETY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ARTIFACTS USED FOR SOCIAL SYSTEM MAINTENANCE IN THE SANTA BARBARA CHANNEL REGION BEFORE A.D. 1804. London: Garland Press.

Knauft, Bruce M. 1990. Violence among newly sedentary foragers. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST (NS) 92:4:1013-1015.

Kroeber, A. L. 1971 [1951]. Elements of culture in native California. In: Heizer, Robert F. & M. A. Whipple (Eds.). THE CALIFORNIA INDIANS (second edition). Berkeley: University of California Press, 3-65.

Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS. (Second Edition). Chicago: University Press.

Kuper, Adam. 1996 [1973]. ANTHROPOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS: THE MODERN BRITISH SCHOOL. London: Routledge.

Kuykendal, Ralph S. 1938. The Hawaiian Kingdom: 1778-1854: Foundation and transformation. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press.

Kuzna, Lawrence & Stephen K. Sanderson. 2008. STUDYING SOCIETIES AND CULTURES: MARVIN HARRIS'S CULTURAL MATERIALISM AND ITS LEGACY. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

//L
Lambert, P. M. & P. L. Walker. 1991. Physical Anthropological evidence for the evolution of social complexity in coastal Southern California. ANTIQUITY. http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/walker/publications/PLW%201991%20Chumash%20Complexity.pdf

Langton, John. 1979. Darwinism and the behavioral theory of sociocultural evolution: An analysis. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 85:2:288-309.

Leach, E. 1954. POLITICAL SYSTEMS OF HIGHLAND BURMA: A STUDY OF KACHIN SOCIAL STRUCTURE. London: Bell and Sons.

Leach, E. R. 1961. PUL ELIYA, A VILLAGE IN CEYLON: A STUDY OF LAND TENURE AND KINSHIP. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leacock, Eleanor Burke. 1978. Women’s status in egalitarian society. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 19:2:247-275.

LeBoutillier, John. 2007. Boot’s blasts. http://leboutillier.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html

Lee, Richard. & I. Devore (Eds.). 1968. MAN THE HUNTER. Chicago: Aldine.

Lenski, Gerhard E. 1966. POWER AND PRIVILEGE: A THEORY OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lerner, Gerda. 1986. THE CREATION OF PATRIARCHY. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lomax, Derek. 1978. THE RECONQUEST OF SPAIN. London: Longman.

Lopreato, Joseph. 1984. HUMAN NATURE AND BIOCULTURAL EVOLUTION. Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin.

Loudon, J. B. 1970. Teasing and socialisation on Tristan da Cunha. In: P. Mayer (Ed.). SOCIALIZATION: THE APPROACH FROM ANTHROPOLOGY. London: Tavistock.

Lloyd-Jones, Hugh (Ed. & Trans.). 1994. Sophocles. VOL. 1: AJAX, ELECTRA, OEDIPUS TYRANNUS. Loeb Classical Library, 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

//M
Malina, Bruce J. 1986. CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: PRACTICAL MODELS FOR BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION. Atlanta: John Knox.

Marlowe, Frank W. 2004. Marital residence among foragers, CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 45:277-284.

Marshall, Lorna. 1965. The Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. In: James L. Gibbs (Ed.). PEOPLES OF AFRICA. New York: Holt.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1975. Traditional and Imposed Political Systems among the Sisala of Northern Ghana, SAVANNA 4, 2, 103-115.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1977. The Explanation of High Fertility among the Sisala of Northern Ghana. In: THE PERSISTENCE OF HIGH FERTILITY: POPULATION PROSPECTS IN THE THIRD WORLD. (Ed.) J. Caldwell. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 225-258.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1976. Elders, Office-Holders and Ancestors among the Sisala of Northern Ghana, AFRICA 46:57-65.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1977. The soul and sacrifice among the Sisala. JOURNAL OF RELIGION IN AFRICA 8:1-17.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1978. Etiology and divination among the Sisala of northern Ghana. JOURNAL OF RELIGION IN AFRICA 9:33-50.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1982. THE POLITICS OF DIVINATION. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2000. SISALA DIVINATION: THE MYSTIC TRADITION. Ethnographic film. Provo, UT: KBYU Television.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2001. CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN A WEST AFRICAN SOCIETY: SISALA ELDERS, YOUTH AND WOMEN. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2002. WEST AFRICA. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2003. Political economy in a goatskin bag: Attempted symbolic power creation in Sisala divination. In: Kroger, Franz & Barbara Meier (Eds.). GHANA’S NORTH. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2008a. THE FABRICATION OF POLITICAL DOMINATION: FROM THE PALEOLITHIC TO THE PRESENT. Internet: Amazon Digital Services (Kindle Version).

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2008b. THE SCRIPTING OF DOMINATION IN MEDIEVAL CATALONIA: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEW. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Métraux, Alfred. 1942. NATIVE TRIBES OF EASTERN BOLIVIA AND WESTERN MATTO GROSSO. Washington D C: Smithsonian & Bureaqu of American Ethnology, Bulletin 134.

Mies, Maria. 1986. PATRIARCHY AND ACCUMULATION ON A WORLD SCALE: WOMEN AND THE INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR. London: Zed Books.

Milisauskas, Sarunas. 2002. EUROPEAN PREHISTORY: A SURVEY. New York: Springer.

Mills, C. Wright. 1956. THE POWER ELITE. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mote, F. W. 1999. Imperial China: 900–1800. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Munch, P. A. 1971. CRISIS IN UTOPIA: THE ORDEAL OF TRISTAN DA CUNHA. New York: Thomas Cromwell.

Murdock, George Peter. 1934. OUR PRIMITIVE CONTEMPORARIES. New York: Macmillan.

Murdock, George Peter. 1968. The current status of the world’s hunting and gathering peoples. In: MAN THE HUNTER. R. B. Lee & I. DeVore (Eds.). Chicago: Aldine, 13-20.

Murdock, George Peter. 1981. ATLAS OF WORLD CULTURES. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

//N
National Veterans Foundation. 2010. (http://nvf.org/?gclid=CLKDvcGE_Z8CFRFbagodwH7elw

Nazareo, de Xaltocan, Don Pablo. 1940. Carta al Rey Don Filip II. In: F. del Paso y Troncosco (Ed.). EPISTOLARIO DEL NUEVA ESPAÑA. México, D. F.: Antigua Libería Robredo, 10:109-129.

Netting, R. McC. 1972. Sacred power and centralization: Aspects of political adaptation in Africa. In: B. Spooner (Ed.). POPULATION GROWTH: ANTHROPOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 219-244.

Netting, R. McC. 1990. Population, permanent agriculture and polities: Unpacking the evolutionary portmanteau. In: S. Upham (Ed.). THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL SYSTEMS: SOCIOPOLITICS IN SMALL-SCALE SEDENTARY SOCIETIES. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21-61.

Nicolas, G. 1969. Fondements magico-religieux du pouvoir politique au sein de la principauté Hausa du Gobir. JOURNAL DE LA SOCIÉTÉ DE AFRICANISTES 39:199-231.

//O
Opinion Roundup. 1979. Public Opinion . 5, October/November.

Ormerod, H. A. 1927. Piracy in the ancient world. In: Eric Partridge (Ed.). PIRATES, HIGHWAYMEN AND ADVENTURERS. London: The Scholartis Press, 13-37.

//P
Peebles, C. S. & S. M. Kus. 1977. Some archaeological correlates of ranked societies. AMERICAN ANTIQUITY 42:421-448.

Pianka, E. R. 1974. EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY. New York: Harper.

Piddocke, S. 1965. The potlatch system of the southern Kwakiutl: A new perspective. SOUTHWEST JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY 21:244-264.

Pinker, Steven. 2003. THE BLANK SLATE: THE MODERN DENIAL OF HUMAN NATURE. New York: Penguin.

Ploeg, Rien. 1991. Divide and pool: Early state economics and the classic Maya. In: H. J. M. Claessen & P. van de Velde (Eds.) POLITICAL & LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY (VOLUME 8): EARLY STATE ECONOMICS. London: Transaction Publishers, 215-230.

//R
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1948 [1922]. THE ANDAMAN ISLANDERS. New York: Free Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press.

Raynault, C. 1976. “Transformation du system de production et inégalité économique: Le cas d’un village Haoussa (Niger).” CANADIEN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES 10:273-306.

Reay, Marie. 1959. The Kuma. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Reilly, Stephen Edward. 1981. A Marriage of Expedience: The Calusa Indians and Their Relations with Pedro Menéndez De Avilés in Southwest Florida, 1566-1569. THE FLORIDA HISTORICAL QUARTERLY 59: 4:395-421

Reiter, Rayna R. 1975. TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF WOMEN. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Remy, Jules (W. T. Brigham, Trans.). 1868. CONTRIBUTIONS OF A VENERABLE NATIVE TO THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS. Boston: Press of A. Kingman, Museum of the Boston Society of Natural History.

Reyna, Stephen P. 1990. Wars WITHOUT END: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF A PRE-COLONIAL STATE. Hanover: University Press of New England.

Ring, Trudy; Salkin, Robert M.; Berney, K. A.; Schellinger, Paul E. (1994). INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF HISTORIC PLACES. London:Taylor & Francis.

Ristvet, Lauren. 2007. IN THE BEGINNING: WORLD HISTORY FROM HUMAN EVOLUTION TO THE FIRST STATES. New York: McGraw Hill.

Rojas, José Luis de. 1986. México-TENOCHTITLAN: ECONOMÍA Y SOCIEDAD EN EL SIGLO XVI. México, D. F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica.

Roper, Marilyn Keyes. 1969. A Survey of the Evidence for Intrahuman Killing in the Pleistocene. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 10:4: 427-459.

Roper, Marilyn Keyes. 1975. Evidence of warfare in the Near East from 10,000-4,300 B.C. In: Martin A. Nettleship et. al., (Eds.). WAR: ITS CAUSES AND CORRELATES. The Hague: Mouton, 299-343.

Roscoe, Paul B. 1993. Practice and political centralization. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 34:2:111-140.

Ross, Marc Howard. 1983. Political decision making and conflict: Additional cross-cultural codes and scales. ETHNOLOGY 22:169-192.

//S
Sahlins, M. 1961. The segmentary lineage: An organization of predatory expansion, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 63:322-345.

Sanderson, Stephen K. nd. Marvin Harris, meet Charles Darwin: A critical evaluation and theoretical extension of cultural materialism.
http://www.chss.iup.edu/sociology/Faculty/Sanderson%20Articles/Harris-Meet-Darwin.htm

Schneider, David M. & Kathleen Gough. 1961. MATRILINEAL KINSHIP. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schumpeter, Joseph. 1975 [1942]. CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY. New York: Harper.

Scott, James C. 1987. WEAPONS OF THE WEAK. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Scott, W. C. & David K. Hart. 1979. ORGANIZATIONAL AMERICA. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Shostak, Marjorie. 2000 [1981]. NISA: THE LIFE AND WORDS OF A !KUNG WOMAN. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Silverman, Sydel. 1970. Exploitation in rural central Italy: Structure and ideology in stratification study. COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN SOCIETY AND HISTORY 12:3:327-339.

Simon, David. R. & Frank Hagen. 1999. WHITE COLLAR DEVIANCE. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Simon, David R. 2002. ÉLITE DEVIANCE. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Sjoberg, Gideon. 1960. THE PREINDUSTRIAL CITY: PAST AND PRESENT. New York: The Free Press.

Smith, M. G. 1956. On segmentary lineage systems. Journal OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY 86:39-81.

Smout, T. C. 1980. Centre and periphery in history; with some thoughts on Scotland as a case study. JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET studies XVIII:3:256-71.

Sombert, Werner. 2001. ECONOMIC LIFE IN THE MODERN AGE (Reiner Grundmann, Ed.). New Brunswick: Transaction.

Stange, Mary Zeiss. 1997. WOMAN THE HUNTER. Boston: Beacon.

Steward, Julian. 1938. BASIN-PLATEAU ABORIGINAL SOCIO-POLITICAL GROUPS. Washington D C: Smithsonian. Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 120.

Sterling, M. W. 1938. Historical AND ETHNOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL ON THE JIVARO INDIANS. Washington D C: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 117.

Suttles, W. 1960. Affinal ties, subsistence, and prestige among the Coast Salish. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 62:296–305.

Suttles, W. 1968. Coping with abundance: Subsistence on the Northwest Coast. In: MAN THE HUNTER. R. B. Lee & I. DeVore (Eds.). Chicago: Aldine, 56-68.

Swanson, John R. 1922. THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CREEK INDIANS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS. Washington D C: Bureau of Ethnology, Government Printing Office.

Swanton, John. 1942. SOURCE MATERIAL ON THE HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY OF THE CADDO INDIANS. Washington D C: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 132.

Swartz, Mimi & Sharron Watkins. 2004. POWER FAILURE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE COLLAPSE OF ENRON. New York: Broadway Business.

Sykes, G. & D. Matza. 1957. Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW 22:664-60.

//T
Testart, Alain. 1982. The significance of food storage among Hunter-gatherers: Residence patterns, population densities and social inequality. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 23:5:523-537.

Testart, Alain. 1988. Appropriation of the social product and production relations in hunter-gatherer societies. DIALECTICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 12:147-64.

Thio, Alex. 2009. DEVIANT BEHAVIOR (10th edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Tilly, Charles. 1992. COERCION, CAPITAL AND EUROPEAN STATES: AD 990 – 1992. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Trosper, Ronald L. 2003. Resilience in Pre-contact Pacific Northwest Social Ecological Systems http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art6/

Turnbull, Colin. M. 1961. THE FOREST PEOPLE. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Turnbull, Colin. M. 1983. MBUTI PYGMIES: CHANGE AND ADAPTATION. New York: CBS College Publishing.

Tyldesley, Joyce. 2000. RAMESSES: EGYPT’S GREATEST PHARAOH. London: Viking/Penguin.

//V
Valerio, Valeri. (P. Wissing, Trans.). 1985. KINGSHIP AND SACRIFICE: RITUAL AND SOCIETY IN ANCIENT HAWAII. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Van Alstine, Michael P. 2006-2007. Executive aggrandizement in foreign affairs lawmaking. UCLA LAW REVIEW 54:309-324.

van den Berghe, Pierre L. 1978. MAN IN SOCIETY: A BIOSOCIAL VIEW. 2nd Ed. New York: Elsevier.

//WA
Walter, Susan M. 2006. Polygyny, rank and resources in Northwest Coast foraging societies. ETHNOLOGY 45:1:41-47.

Watts, M. 1983. SILENT VIOLENCE. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Widmer, Randolph J. 1988. THE EVOLUTION OF THE CALUSA: A NONAGRICULTURAL CHIEFDOM ON THE SOUTHWEST FLORIDA COAST. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Wiessner, Polly. 1982. “Risk, reciprocity, and social influence on !Kung San economies.” In Eleanor Burke Leacock and Richard B. Lee (Eds.), POLITICS AND HISTORY IN BAND SOCIETIES. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Winterhalder, Bruce. 1986a. “Diet choice, risk, and food sharing in a stochastic environment.” JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 5:369-92.

_____. 1986b. “Optimal foraging: Simulation studies of diet choice in a stochastic environment.” JOURNAL OF ETHNOBIOLOGY 6:205-23.

Wittfogel, Karl A. 1955. Development aspects of hydraulic societies. In: Steward, J. (Ed.). IRRIGATION CIVILIZATIONS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY. Washington, D.C.: Social Science Section, Dept. of Cultural Affairs, Pan American Union.

Wittfogel, Karl A. 1957. ORIENTAL DESPOTISM: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TOTAL POWER. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and THE PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Woodburn, James. 1982. Egalitarian societies. MAN (NS) 17:3:431-451.

Wrangham, Richard & Dale Peterson. 1997. DEMONIC MALES: APES AND THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN VIOLENCE. Boston: Mariner Books.

Wright, Quincy. 1942. A STUDY OF WAR. Chicago: University Press.

//Z
Zerzan, John. Nd. Patriarchy, civilization and the origins of gender. http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/patriarchy.htm

Zimmer, Carl. 2001. Evolution: The triumph of an idea. New York: HarperCollins.