Domination: chapter 2

2. IMPLICATIONS OF THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION

Domestication: A Revolution

As we saw with the Natufians, the big jump in complexity came when humans learned how to grow crops and breed animals as a food source. This is called the Neolithic Revolution or as some say, the Agricultural Revolution. Why a revolution? Because this gigantic shift in human productivity provided a source of wealth that was not necessarily tied to a tiny eco-niche of abundance, as with the hunter-gatherer-fisher storagers. People in really marginal environments, such as the cold steppes of Eurasia, could survive by herding reindeer and, at the same time, people in the tropics could subsist by growing bananas and root crops. Once domestication of plants and animals became known, it spread to the four corners of the earth rather quickly. So did institutions of domination.
With the advent of domestication, exploitation by an élite few was no longer tied to ocean-reared salmon coming up a river, as in the case of the Northwest Coast Amerindians. With a flexible and moveable capacity to create a surplus almost anywhere on earth aggrandizers could fabricate domination in multiple environments, from fields or herds or from mixed farming.
Wherever a surplus was produced – be it from a lush marine environment, farming, herding or a mixture of farming and herding – the propagandists went to work. We saw that with the nascent political activities of those Natufian leaders who regulated mortuary rites. Initially these leaders were headmen and chiefs who fabricated ideas and codes that gave them permission to control things. The usual justification for this was the need to defend the group, which often was a valid argument, as there were impoverished hoards that occasionally attacked those with stored provisions and tried to take the wealth stocked up in granaries and herds. Additionally, since land could produce wealth with labor input, slaves taken in warfare were a premium catch.
Once surplus wealth existed, in any form, leaders began to formulate codes and scripts to justify their privileged access to this wealth. They used diviners, purveyors of magic and all sorts of “hocus pocus personnel” to make it appear that they were up to something other than exploitative domination, but that’s what it eventually amounted to. They established sacred sites, shrines, talismans and all manner of supernatural paraphernalia to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. In Chomsky’s terminology, they were “manufacturing consent” (Chomsky &. Herman. 1988). One might be inclined to disagree with a chief, but not with God or cosmic powers, so propagandists usually set about to make a linkage between leadership and Deity, as we saw with the megaliths of Europe.
Hunter-gatherer-fisher storagers did this on a small scale. When we get to societies like ancient Egypt, the scriptwriting is literally on the walls of monumental architecture. For example, Ramesses II (3279-3213 B.P.) is known as one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs, which is a testament to his expertise at self-promotion. Nine further pharaohs tried to emulate his success by taking his name. Although the pharaoh was renowned as a warrior-king he suffered several military setbacks, but he successfully covered up his blunders in the field by creating lasting images of himself at home. Ramesses owed his reputation to his skills as a self-publicist. He had his architects erect more statues than any other Egyptian pharaoh. He even changed or added to the inscriptions on former pharaohs' statues to glorify himself. This ensured that Ramesses II was worshiped as a god for centuries after his death.
 
The Rise of the State in Egypt

How did magnificent and powerful leaders like Ramesses II come into being? Egypt is an interesting case. The area along the great Nile River of Northeast Africa was inhabited by hunter-gatherers who also began to nudge nature, relying on the river’s annual floods and the rich soils of the Nile Delta to grow wheat, barley, vegetables, figs, melons, pomegranates, and flax which was used to make linen, among other crops. Early farmers also had cattle, pigs, goats and sheep. They were also fishers (Clark 1971). This was accomplished by about 7 thousand B.P. This was a pre-dynastic phase with various communities of farmers exercising local control. These hunter-gatherer-farmers produced at least a seasonal surplus since granaries have been discovered in their dwelling sites (Caton-Thompson & Gardner 1934:41). It would seem from the archaeological data that these Neolithic people had more or less permanent settlements, the population of which was women, children and the elderly, with some men away hunting, fishing and herding. They also penned their domestic animals and produced pottery. They lived in wickerwork huts covered with woven mats although by about 5.750 B.P. they these circular wickiups were replaced by mud ones, some of which were rectangular in shape (Hassan 1988:155). These settlements show evidence of communal granaries, which seem to indicate community organization and managers (Hassan 1988:150). Chiefly houses with shrines have been unearthed (Hassan 1988:157). At this time (ca. 5,800 B.P.), hunting became less important and farming and herding predominated, though the people continued to fish. There is some evidence of water management, though not true irrigation at this point (Butzer 1976:20-21). Nevertheless, it is unlikely that control of water had much to do with the rise of the Egyptian State (Krzysaniak 1977).
These pre-dynastic communities faced a common problem – the fluctuation in the life-giving flooding of the Nile River. Communities tried to deal with this destabilizing influence on their agricultural economy by organizing inter-regionally, which led to the rise of chiefs (Hassan 1988). These leaders bolstered their authority with supernatural ideology and rituals associated with fecundity, fertility and death. About 5,600 B.P. alliances and warfare between chiefdoms led to the rise of a state ruled by supreme rulers. These early kings based there authority on the pre-dynastic funerary cult and associated occult ideas. They also moved to control agricultural production and the trade which flourished along the great river.
Inter-regional trade was facilitated by the domesticated donkey (ca. 5,650 B.P.), which augmented river trade. Bulky grain and other stored foodstuffs could be move on the river by barge, but overland was a different story. The use of the donkey, which can carry 200-300 kg of goods (440-660 lbs), help with transport between communities by land routes. Thus, accumulated stores could be used, not only for personal consumption, but also for trading purposes. This made the control of stored foodstuffs even more desirable to aggrandizers, as grain was the main medium of exchange and also could be transported to be exchanged with distant traders. Control of grain meant control of trade.
By about 6 thousand B.P. the Nile Valley was dotted with small communities linked by trade routes along the course of the Nile River from Central Sudan to the Delta.

[WRITING HERE IN PROGRESS]

Monuments were intended to be performative. Their construction required bringing together community members in a collective effort to manufacture something of value. The coordination of their efforts may have involved the creation and manipulation of indebtedness, affiliation and alliance. Monuments, once built by a community, acquired a history. Each subsequent ritual held at the monument would add to that history, beyond the communal act of construction. It would then become a materialized focal point for community feelings of unity (communitas) and for the leader who managed its construction and maintenance.
And, of course, the monuments and pyramids were another form of script demonstrating a leader's capacity to marshal labor and resources, part of his overall resource amassment system. For example, pharaohs of the many kingdoms of Egypt employed religious experts, artisans and architects to construct lasting testaments to their divine right to rule. It was billed as being about eternal life and issues not directly connected with matters of this earth, but it was really about creating a myth of infallibility for the ruling class. It concerned using a fabricated script to control the minds of the masses so as to corner the market on power, prestige and wealth.
As a surplus became available people (labor) became more important to control because they could help defend the surplus and also could help produce it. Thus, a have/have-not world arose where some men controlled material assets and people and others began to work for them or attack them.
Since outsiders strove to get at the surplus through warfare, there arose a need for defense, which became a justification for the fabrication of poleconomic rule-sets. Writing about Philippine chiefdoms, Laura Lee Junker notes the rise of warfare in the Iron Age (1200-550 B.P.):

The rising emphasis on militarism in Early Iron Age society is evidenced archaeologically in technological developments in military equipment (e.g., iron weaponry and armor), the construction of sophisticated fortification, the introduction of mounted cavalry as a widely used military strategy in later phases, and direct evidence of periodic destruction of major town centers (e.g., the periodic burning a rebuilding of the massive fortifications at Heuneberg). Enhanced military capacities in expanding polities not only served to impede production and trade in their militarily weaker neighbors, but also were likely to have enhanced the ability of these militaristically strong polities to mobilize export goods to attract foreign traders, because the threat of violence was an effective tool for coercion of the internal work force (1999:7-8).

The other reason why it became important to control people was that armies were used for more than defense. Leaders became aggressive and went after the surpluses and workers of their neighbors. War became a means of getting the surplus of others and slaves that could be put to work at home producing more food and performing labor for conquerors. Furthermore, as land had become valuable, leaders wanted to have more. As Sahlins has pointed out, predatory territorial expansion became an option for opportunists (1961).
To a certain extent, the Neolithic Revolution was about new technology and greater productivity, but it was also a Jural Revolution i.e., the emergence of newly fabricated rights and duties, with the few fabricators getting the bulk of the rights and the majority of people being burdened with duties e.g., responsibilities in the corvée and even slavery. But these rights and duties, no doubt, took time to develop.
Furthermore, it is not a simple matter either of holding wealth for oneself or sharing. For example, a donkey could be used to carry a large harvest of food back to camp to be distributed, bringing the owner kudos. The milk from “owned” cows could be distributed to all in the village. No doubt, at first, men gained prestige by being, or appearing to be, “good citizens.” In such ways, ownership in Neolithic times would have slowly come to be grafted into the way of life that had long prohibited individual ownership and personal aggrandizement. However long it took, eventually ideas of private ownership and exclusive rights to wealth and labor evolved.
The world of farming and herding provided fertile ground for self-advancement. As soon as necessity changed the historical-material world of our Neolithic ancestors, opportunists rose to the top of society and began to put together a new social, political and economic world. They created a doctrine of rule. Sometimes they did this by conquest and the use of force, but long-term control of societies came through the use of the Pen, not the Sword i.e., through lawmaking. I say the Pen, but many of these early Neolithic societies were preliterate and their “scriptwriting” was done through the creation of oral codes – proverbs and legends; and also by establishing rites and ceremonies, which, when repeated, were materializations of ruling power. Written, oral or behavioral, these community-based codifications laid the basis for domination.
My perspective is that once food was produced,(not simply gathered or hunted) calories were no longer stored in Nature’s Larder, as had been the case in the Paleolithic; but now came to be stored under the control of leaders. Thus, access to food became regulated by social codes.
This is still the case in some tribal peoples today. For instance, among the people I studied in Northern Ghana, who live a life not unlike those who farmed in the early Neolithic, Sisala lineage headmen store food in granaries, which are easily accessed physically by anyone in the group. However, only the headman has the right to do so. There are strong sanctions (fabricated supernatural ones) against anyone even putting a hand into the granary without his permission. The ancestors, according to legend, will kill such a thief. Physically, the mud granary is a storage bin. It could easily be violated. Yet, to prevent theft, Sisala headmen also define it as a vene, a shrine of the owning kin unit. Ideationally, mystical ideas over the centuries evolved in such societies to give headmen control over the distribution of food and the allocation of labor.
Thus, we see in food producing societies the proliferation of fabricated codes and mystifications to control access to the surplus. There were more artificial boundaries created and imposed on the natural landscape in Neolithic times than had existed in the Paleolithic. Space became social. Some space was also specialized as socioeconomic space e.g., farmland. In the Paleolithic, land had not been valuable in a poleconomic sense. It just housed Nature’s Larder. After the Agricultural Revolution, all productive space came to be governed by access and use rules. Socially defined productive space had to be controlled, not so much for itself, but because it was now productive (or strategic in a military sense). Land took on a new meaning in human life. It could produce food and be held against invaders. It could be a chief’s hegemonic slice of the terrain. Warfare became “rational” because the land of others was valuable for the same reasons.
Perhaps because women were the carriers of children and also of sexual gratification for men, access to them was always regulated by rules, albeit to a lesser extent in the Paleolithic than after the Agricultural Revolution. After domestication of plants and animals, more regulation of women became necessary. As Gerda Lerner notes, patriarchy was in the offing. Once food was produced and stored, not gathered and eaten immediately, women become doubly valuable in an economic sense. First, they could work to produce food and, secondly, they were a means by which new laborers and soldiers were produced, though of course leaders also figured out that laborers and other women could be taken from nearby groups through capture as well. Protection of women, alongside food, became one of the justifications for the rise of managers in society.
The point is that in the production of food a Jural Revolution was born – one that justified hierarchical control of resources and personnel, especially women. All sorts of new rules about the control of food and women came into being and it was senior men, the cultural equivalent of alpha males in primates, making rules and enforcing them. In kin-based societies, there rules also applied to junior males, who were valuable as laborers and warriors. As chiefdoms developed, chiefs applied the rules to commoners.
Land was a valuable resource, as were women and young laborers. All had to be controlled. It now paid to store food, guard it and to raid for food and labor. These activities took a level of organization beyond simple descent groups. Both production and reproduction needed to have overarching governing rules and cultural codes and men set about to create them, usually linking these jural artifacts to imagined powers.
In the Jural Revolution, early aggrandizers had to redefine the nature of community and reciprocity in order to be able to begin the processes of accumulation, exaction and domination. They had to replace what Hanna Arendt calls “common interest" with self-interest. Arendt (2003) makes the point that “common interest" separates a class of self-interested individuals apart from the community. A new kind of limited common interest arose. It was the interest of the privileged few. The common good began to be eroded as élites started to construct cultural reasons why they should receive and hold privileges, eventually passing these on to their offspring or chosen office-holders.
The only societies where radical hierarchy and exploitation have not grown are those in which the material base would not support it, as I have shown to be the case among the Sisala in Continuity and Change in a West African Society. In that small relatively egalitarian farming society, with the coming of economic and political opportunities after contact in 1906, slowly élites began to emerge in the larger towns. Prior to that there was little to control beyond the family. There was little need for chiefly rule until wealth arose beyond subsistence production, distribution and consumption within the lineage. Once there was surplus wealth beyond this level in Sisalaland, aggrandizers moved to formulate rules and roles to have access to it.
The other reason why chiefs arose in Sisalaland was attacks by slave raiders. This led opportunists to organize people, build fortifications, move to defensible spots (such as the hilltop called yalingbong – the “war rock”) and generally create a new form of society that could withstand harassment by raiders. These were situational leaders and chiefship did not become widely practiced in Sisalaland, nor was it firmly entrenched before the Colonial Era.
Hierarchy emerges when there are opportunities for aggrandizers. In chapter 2 of Continuity and Change in a West African Society I chronicle the life of a Sisala big man/little chief named Dolbizon who rose to prominence in the heat of the slave wars. Leadership presented itself and he rose to the occasion. According to the archaeologist Natalie Swanepoel (2004), it seems that Dolbizon’s control was more political than economic. Her excavations in Sisalaland show that he was working with a limited material base and merely commanded his hill fortress to defend his followers without developing a personal material lifestyle much greater than average. We will not know if such incipient leadership would have gelled into full-blown chiefship in time because the activities of the slave raiders were cut short by the coming of the British.
Furthermore, the Sisala operated within the well-known “wealth-in-people” system of Africa in which social banking is more important than possessing great material goods. It is likely that Dolbizon invested in social relations and followers rather than goods. Furthermore, there was little material surplus available in Dolbizon’s time, when slave raiders were ravaging the area.
What the larger historical record shows is that the greater the surplus available for control, the greater the severity of hierarchy and domination. Political control was a platform upon which economic control could be built if and when changes in the historical-material conditions allowed it.

The Jural Revolution in the Neolithic

When did aggrandizement become widely institutionalized among humans? For most areas the fabrication of domination came with the Neolithic Revolution – after the domestication of plants and animals. In resource rich areas before that, some hunter-gatherer-fishers may have developed complex social structures because aggrandizers were able to fabricate rules preventing universal access to highly desirable resources. Data on such societies about which we have historical and archaeological data reinforces my point that selfism and factionalism become institutionalized when there was a poleconomic incentive to do so. In the few cases of resource rich environments, where access to a valued resource could be curtailed, chiefs emerged to manage access to the resource. Where no such resource-limiting-opportunity existed, hunter-gatherers remained egalitarian.
In these few cases, and in the more numerous examples from farming and herding peoples, there was one common denominator associated with the emergence of poleconomic complexity: the existence of a storable, stealable surplus. Julian Thomas (1991) makes the point that economic activities in the Neolithic were quite varied, with foraging continuing to be important. Furthermore, he says that it was not one economic system, not even agriculture, which produced dramatic changes in sociocultural formations. In other words, the storable, stealable surplus most likely came from a combination of sources. Some hunter-gatherer-fisher storagers may have begun to farm and/or herd, but continued to harvest nature as well. Likewise, those who began farming and herding did not stop foraging and hunting.
Aggrandizement and domination emerged in all kinds of economies with such a surplus. From then on in history, whatever the socioeconomic structure aggrandizers engaged in strategic efforts to control other kinds of resources e.g., craft production and long distance trade. Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis centered on control of water resources by élites (1957). He claimed that élites emerged to construct, maintain and operate large-scale irrigation systems in farming societies. From his work it follows that centralized management eventually yielded coercive power.
Sometimes management was good for society, sometimes only a few benefited and at times it was beneficial for individuals, factions and society at large. Élites constructed scripts to justify their self-interestedness based on social benefit. In time these ideologies worked, creating defense or organizing production and the opportunists became formal office-holders who came to have the right to rule i.e., chiefs. As such, they had access to fabricated authority and could use that newfound power to harness labor value and other resources for public and private ends. Thus, domination was a constructed effort. In other words, in the Jural Revolution we can see a connection between resource management and political development.
The Jural Revolution was about the fabrication of rules giving individuals or groups rights to property and labor. At the same time, as property and labor came to be “owned,” rules also defined who did not own them – who could not possess, distribute or alienate them. Rule-sets can be both inclusive and exclusive. The Jural Revolution, then, was a time when aggrandizers constructed norms that specified who had what kind of rights to receive and hold natural resources, tools, products, trading links and people (labor). As Earle (1998, 2000) notes, the core of property is the right to exclude.
Property, in the broad sense, became something to be possessed and guarded. It had to be regulated through the construction of scripts. Bourdieu (1998) notes that a discourse can be created through the use of symbolic force. For example, the law is full of legal fictions e.g., adoptio, or the idea that a paterfamilias can transfer rights over a child. Such fabricated or assumed rights are also found in Roman law’s concept of in manus, the right of the father to give away a daughter in marriage. These were social constructions, ones that gave the ancients rights to property, even defining some people as property. All such imagined rights were absent in the non-storing Paleolithic peoples.
The Jural Revolution saw the emergence of formalized conventions, which I call scripts. Theoretically speaking, I see a script in the same manner as Foucault (1977, 1982) discusses the “law of truth.” Scriptwriters or spindoctors (shamans, priests) intended to create the aura of verity in their products (just as the White House press secretary does at a press conference standing behind the presidential seal and flanked by U.S. flags).
No doubt, the first poleconomic scripts were presented as unquestionable truth. Faced with a new material base, life in the Neolithic became a contest between élite scripts. Some scripts were deemed good, while others were defined by élites as deviant. Privileged rulers moved to coalesce power in order to be able to eradicate such “nonstandard” ideas.
I have said that aggrandizers existed in the Paleolithic, but there was no reason for them to fabricate domineering norms because there was no poleconomic payoff in doing so. After the emergence of a storable, stealable surplus there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Aggrandizers set about constructing discourses to justify their desire for control. The aim of a poleconomic script was the “subjectivization” of others, the control of the minds of those who came to accept the script as truth. The subject’s mental and emotional acceptance of a dominating script was the means by which s/he was subjugated, transformed script-wise into a follower.
In the Agricultural Revolution, privileged élites began to restrict access to wealth by constructing ideologies and did not allocate or transfer it widely. Instead, the people had to abide by ideas, rules and institutions created by a managerial élite. In other words, this was the beginning of the foundations of ranking and stratification – of inequality more broadly defined.
Because of agricultural productivity, land became important after domestication. Land and people became something to be specified in scripts, allocated and defended. Men claimed it through a variety of imaginations. One was original possession – “we were here first.” Another was that ownership rested on the fact that the “owners” had improved the land by investing their labor in it. Yet again, land was claimed to be heritable, attached to a bloodline, so to speak. It could be passed to one’s heirs in the next generation. Finally, land could be taken and held by conquest, possession being nine-tenths of the law.
After the Agricultural Revolution, theft and warfare became possible on a large scale, presumably leading, in time to an increase in warfare (organized violence) and attempts to conquer other people’s property (organized theft). And, as I show in The Scripting of Domination in Medieval Catalonia, extortion – even imperialism – became very much a part of the polity of ancient Catalonia (also see chapters 8 & 9 below).
Not only was there good reason to go to war, defensive or offensive, but also newer and better weapons increased the scale of destruction involved. Unlike the equality of weaponry of the Paleolithic, some societies could develop better weapons than their neighbors and conquer them. Sometimes these “neighbors” were members of one’s own society, as when the Catalan castle-lords rampaged against each other in search of land and peasant workers. Between élites it was more or less a fair fight, but when the mounted aristocracy swooped down on barefoot peasants with their steel swords and lances, the wooden pitchfork was all but useless.
As the domestication of plants and animals proceeded, opportunists slowly created rules of domination. That is, they fabricated norms to limit access to natural resources and the surplus provided by domestication. At this time, for the first time in the long existence of our species, a small contingent of agents came to define how access to nature and its bounty would proceed. In other words, they constructed social relations through which value had to be mediated. Of course, they also defined themselves as the managers of that process – as office-holders. Another way of saying this is that, for the first time, humankind had to approach nature and its produce through social structural means.
Within the social structure, aggrandizers manipulated and maneuvered to promote the interests of special groups e.g., kith, kin, networks of friends, sodalities or their ethnic group (later in history we would have to add economic corporations to this list).
Such promotion would have been unacceptable in the Paleolithic. Even in the Neolithic, aggrandizement must have run up against the communalistic ethos (what Sahlins calls generalized reciprocity) that did not go away overnight. Certainly, the fabrication of domination was an incremental process that proceeded slowly and unevenly. Élites could not merely bully others, but found it necessary to slowly script their management of vital resources.
This fabrication of power and ownership occurred through oral means at first; then was codified in writing in later literate societies (see my: Literacy and the Culture of Domination in Medieval Catalonia).
Managerial élites ruled by the Sword, but also later by the Pen, with many fabricated oral histories (legends, myths, proverbs, ritual practices) in between. The building blocks of these constructions were rules about power and access to wealth and labor. These social structures go by various names – patriarchy, gerontocracy – but they all were designed to give some men (and occasionally women) privileged access to poleconomic value – wealth, prestige and power.
The men behind these structures were often organized at the top of the hierarchy, lording it over others. They participated in networks comprised of those considered to be “in the know.” Hierarchy was not only a system of signification, but also a configuration of domination and the holding and withholding of information from the public.
Sociologically, we know that to justify mastery, dominators establish categories, then moral hierarchies, that distinguish the pure and impure in a fashion that set untouchables off from the rest of the caste orders in ancient India or kaffirs from Whites in Apartheid South Africa. More generally, domination permits the establishment of a hierarchical arrangement of owner-rulers over those less wealthy and less powerful.

Neolithic Offices and Normative Manipulation

There were no offices in the Paleolithic, in the sense of an inherited status passed from generation to generation, not even family headmen or chiefs (storagers being the exception, if some hunter-gatherer-fishers established themselves before the advent of the Neolithic). The prestige of an influential leader died with him or her. That changed after the Agricultural Revolution. Offices such as headman, chief and king emerged. Some men came to claim that they were emperors, even gods (see chapter 7).
The rationale behind an office was usually that the occupant would benefit society in some way. This was valid in some ways, but I am more concerned with the illegitimate functions of office because their exercise is how the tyranny of domination began and continues today (see chapter 10). Office-holders can do good and bad from their perches. In early times, many of these offices were overtly political, but men very quickly learned how to make them economic i.e., to use their offices to amass personal fortunes and to lodge those riches in family lines.
Today, we can see the reverse process. Executives within corporations and even more so those holding great wealth, can exert undo influence over politicians, corrupting political processes. Some use their wealth more straightforwardly to secure political office. This is why I prefer the term poleconomic instead of using political and economic separately, because the two have gone together so often in history, either at the start of the Neolithic or now.
How does office-holding lead to domination? An office can be a shield, hiding covert behavior that is not in the interests of society. For example, among the Yokut-Mono Amerindians of California, chiefs sometimes took bribes to allow someone to be killed, even within their own Eagle Moiety, according to Gayton (1930). 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. In the Yakut-Mono case, 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 enriched him.
Chiefs and other office-holders usually portray themselves as public servants and holding office is depicted as a burden. Gayton indicates that a Yokut-Mono 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. The chief was supposed to appear to be giving lavishly in spite of the fact that it was the people who paid for the performances. No public dues were levied and placed in a general fund, but the simpler expedient of having the persons present at any ceremony contribute on the spot produced the same result.
The end result was, as with his control of trade, the control of ceremonies gave the chief a means of making a profit. This was the generally accepted picture of the chief, however a chief who was not a good man and who had a desire for personal aggrandizement could make illegitimate arrangements with equally malevolent shamans (winatums).
Thus, one avaricious strategy open to chiefs was criminal collusion with occult entrepreneurs. The fear of self-interestedness by officials and co-conspiratorial shamans, 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.
If the aggrandizers had stratagems, so did the community. Given the fact that little chiefs did not control the means of coercion, and shamans only had their "imagined powers," it was a simple, direct and straightforward strategy for the community: if a man knew positively that a doctor had killed a member of his family he could take it upon himself to kill the doctor. He would just get his bow and go out and hide until he had a chance to shoot the doctor.
Lest we think this violence is the purview of primitive people, as I was writing this a mayor in a tiny village in the Pyrenees was murdered and the Spanish police are holding all thirty-seven villagers there as suspects, extracting DNA from all in order to find the murderer or murderers. Some villagers explained that they thought he was murdered because he was using his office to impose his private wishes on the community (see the next chapter for more on the Yokut-Mono).
It has always been dangerous to act out of step with the public image of office. Richard Nixon found that out and that is why he and his aides spent so much time and effort in the cover-up. Shenanigans of office-holders need to be hidden from public scrutiny. When Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew resigned and then pleaded no contest to criminal charges of tax evasion, which was part of a negotiated settlement concerning a scheme wherein he was accused of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes while serving as governor of Maryland. As I first began to write this chapter, the Alberto Gonzales affair raged in Washington DC and, amid several controversies and allegations of perjury before Congress, on August 27, 2007 Gonzales announced his resignation as Attorney General, effective September 17, 2007. About a year later Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York resigned in the wake of the exposure of his involvement as a client in a high-priced prostitution ring. Even potential office-holders have to be careful, as John Edwards found out when it was revealed that he fathered a child with his mistress while his cancer-stricken wife was undergoing therapy. The list of recently disgraced politicians includes: Congressman Eric Massa, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, House Majority Whip Tom Delay, New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. There is also the case of the hugely successful lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to charges of conspiracy, honest services fraud and tax evasion. This list goes on. Disgrace and prison sentences being the penalties in modern-day political scandals, office-holders take extreme caution behind the shield of office to avoid exposure of their wrongdoings.
I mention these cases of official disgrace because, as I will bring into greater focus in chapter 10, one hope we have for the future, in which we and our grandchildren will be living under the governance of the nation state, is for the general public to have greater access to what goes on behind the shield of office. Official opaqueness is the enemy of democracy.
Office-holders have the power to act in public and in secret. Anthony Giddens (1976, 1979) sees power as transformational, something that, when exercised by agents, can change the course of history or intervene in a flow of events to alter its direction. In this perspective, power resides in action. Office-holders are especially powerful agents. An office-holder can decide on a course of action and effectuate a desired outcome, overcoming obstacles and countermanding the interests of others. This can be done in accordance with the official duties of the agent, or contra his responsibilities as an officer.
Famously, we saw contrary power exercised in the actions of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers scandal. Less meritoriously, we also saw it in the actions of the Enron finance chief, Andrew Fastow. He has pleaded guilty to using his office to break laws and pursue his private interests contra the interests of Enron stockholders, company employees and society at large. The point in both cases is that there is a backstage to office. While offstage, office-holders are free to act in ways that are not always observable to the general public, nor are such actions always in the public interest.
Agents exercising power have at their disposal powerful tools of legitimization: cultural capital, their knowledge of office and the general culture of the people. Giddens sees agents exercising power by using stored resources or capabilities. I am saying that one of those resources, a significant one, is office itself, but not only in the Parsonian sense that authority provides legitimate capability to act, but in the opposite sense i.e., that an office-holder can act in dishonest ways behind the shield of office, the apparent authority of office acting as a opaque breastwork against scrutiny by outsiders.
Conspirators face a troublesome quandary if they attempt to design communication networks that maximize both secrecy and efficiency. Secrets are better kept in a diffuse or decentralized network. This is why Al Quæda is not a traditional hierarchical organization. It is also why the CIA operates on a need-to-know basis. Secrecy requires decentralized communication networks, but task efficiency is better performed in centralized ones. Within centralized structures illegal behavior is best kept hidden by developing a buffer to maintain secrecy. Office can shield deviants from prying eyes and ears. Office can buffer deviant behavior because investigators may have to respect the office e.g., those investigating possible wrongdoing by White House officers.
Aggrandizers throughout history have developed offices and organizations as shelters. Noble jurisdictions, charters granted to towns, gilds, marketers, ecclesiastical units, were essentially poleconomic shields, fabricated “shells of immunity,” within which privileges were encapsulated. They shielded élites from commoners and from being considered common. They also gave acquisitive operators a protective domain inside of which they could pursue their interests in greater power and more wealth.
I am addressing a key empirical question in this study: what immunities can élites fabricate to protect their poleconomic interests? In other words, what structural shields do they invent to allow them to pursue their private interests in spite of the fact that those pursuits may not coincide with wider human security? What activities do opportunistic office-holders pursue behind closed doors that may be detrimental to the social good? What are the various normative ways in which avaricious élites can cover their antisocial activities?
One of the strategies used by office-holders from time immemorial has been to reify the structure in which they operate. This made their behavior unquestionable. Our little chief of the Yokut-Mono Amerindians of California didn’t have a well-developed reified structure in place to completely insulate him against societal aggression, but as societies evolved beyond this stage political structures became more and more reified and protective of office-holders.
Reification is a feature of all social life. Reifications are accepted scripts. Such longstanding scripts (traditions) can be reworded and reworked for specific applications by knowledgeable office-holders. These rewrites can be performed to shield backroom dealings or to stimulate the public to think along certain lines conducive to the interests of the office-holders.
As James Scott (1990) indicates, ideological resistance can develop best when it is shielded from direct observation, but this is equally true of the secret machinations of the powerful. The real nature of their domination must be mystified and shielded from public scrutiny if they are to remain in office e.g., Richard Nixon may have been able to ride out the crisis of Watergate if information of White House wrongdoing had not seen the light of day, that which came into public view through insider testimony and the revelations of the Oval Office tapes.
Sometimes office-holders do not act in ways that personally benefit them in the short term or while they are in office, but make secret decisions that, if they came to light, would alter significant events in history. Such was the case with Operation Condor. In 1976, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were engaged in a program of repression, code-named Operation Condor, which targeted their political opponents around the world. In April of 2010, 34 years after the assassination in question, newly declassified documents offered evidence that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger canceled a warning against carrying out a secret program of international political assassinations just days before former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier was killed by operatives of Operation Condon in Washington, DC.
These secret documents show that Kissinger blocked the issuing of a demarche (a diplomatic denunciation) to the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet that would have likely indicated to the dictator and operatives of Operation Condor that the U.S. government would disapprove of the planned assassination of the former Chilean ambassador, who had turned against the Pinochet regime. Apparently, Kissinger was deterred from issuing the demarche because the U.S. Ambassador in Chili felt that Pinochet would be angered by such a warning and that Washington had received a communiqué from the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay feared for his life is he had to present the demarche to that government. When such documents see the light of day through declassification and demands by activists through the Freedom of Information Act, we are given some insight into the secret workings of office-holders in Washington D C. But if we had that knowledge at the time, perhaps international assassinations, renditions (handing over prisoners to countries where torture is allowed) and torture of political prisoners by our own operatives would be curtailed.
Without transparency into such matters, however, those who work against the principles of the U.S. Constitution behind closed doors go unpunished. Some, as with Kissinger, go on to honorable retirements from public service and to consultancies and employment that brings them great wealth. For example, Henry Kissinger, a Nobel Laureate, is chairman of Kissinger Inc. He is also associated with Kissinger McLarty Associates, which provides strategic advisory and advocacy services to a select group of U.S. corporations and multinational companies. Kissinger McLarty Associates provides high-level intervention on special projects, assists its clients to identify strategic partners and investment opportunities and advises clients on government relations globally. The Chairman and Vice Chairman of the firm are Dr. Henry Kissinger and Thomas F. "Mack'' McLarty, who worked with Presidents Carter, Bush, and Clinton, including service as President Clinton's Chief of Staff and Special Envoy for the Americas. Such men are able to greatly profit from their “public service.” Recently Dr. Kissinger had to resign from the 911 Commission because he refused to reveal his sources of income (Hobbs 2002).
It is not that we should deny office-holders like Kissinger and McLarty their foreign contacts and sources of income, but we should expect that decisions in office are not being unduly influenced by anticipation of exploiting those links after they leave office.
What I am saying is that the institutionalized arena was (and remains) a special case, one giving advantage to the office-holder, operating behind the shield of authority. This had implications for the accumulation of power over time. Power has an accretional nature. Little by little it became lodged in privileged structures. In history there have been aggregate consequences to manipulative strategies taken by men with conflicting interests. Aggregated power can sometimes be boldly deployed (Alexander the Great or Saddam Hussein, to name only two dictatorial leaders). But it can also be discretely hidden within democratic institutions. More on this later.
A main strategy of aggrandizers throughout history has been to hide power within corporations, using this term in a broad sense. By that I mean that secret societies, men’s clubs or voluntary associations can be seen as corporations. Let's look at this concept in more detail. Lewis Henry Morgan's discovery of the corporate nature of descent groups is perhaps his greatest contribution (Morgan 1877 & see Fortes 1969). This development of corporatism in surplus-holding societies both set them apart from non-storing foragers and provides the link between early accumulation and domination and the continuation of these processes in the modern world. In other words, Morgan realized that as humans associated with each other under conditions of surplus and sedentarism, social relations tend to move from association to aggregation, to form corporate groups that act as a single legal entity, a corporation sole.
Webster defines a corporation as "a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person although constituted by one or more persons and legally endowed with various rights and duties including the capacity of succession." As Fortes rightly points out, this discovery led to a jural approach to the study of kinship and the social order.
But Morgan and Fortes missed the importance of corporatism in terms of the development of a political economy, though Morgan had threads of it in his discussion of egalitarianism and the lack of private property in early societies. Fortes saw the corporation as a stabilizing structure in society. I see it as containing the seeds of change.
Once the concept of a corporation sole was implanted in the minds of humans, and once it became an accepted part of the culture of human beings, it provided a basis for the formation of a political economy, an institutional framework that allowed some men to dominate others, some men to be office-holders in corporate structures holding rights and duties over the production, distribution and use of wealth and to act as governors in the passing of such wealth and also offices to the next generation. The corporation was a great new shield.
Such corporations formed as descent groups, age-sets, secret societies, gilds, franchised municipalities and later as states and nations. Such corporations came to have rights and duties independent of the occupants of their offices, so the focus was on the structure and not the persons in office. Early on, clans developed rights over individuals. Those with rights had, ipso facto, duties to perform and responsibilities toward the group as a whole. The leaders might not have performed their duties diligently, but the members owed allegiance to the group, not to any occupant or occupants of office. The reification of the descent group was a shield for very minor deviant behavior by office-holders, should they have wished to use the kinship structure in that manner. It was a perfect place within which to siphon off a minimal surplus value of human labor and other corporations were on the way where greater value could be siphoned.
Accordingly, the reified structure of such corporations became a veritable shield for behind the scenes manipulation of rules and maneuvers to secure greater power, prestige and property. Using justifiable structures and offices, men began to find ways to use such forms to accumulate property and wealth, to place themselves and their kind above others, to mandate rules governing economic activities like agricultural production, trade, craft production, feasts and ceremonies, herding, management of water resources and the like.
Furthermore, élites had to find ways to fund these enterprises. By using their offices in corporations to extend their control beyond the limits of office, a little bit farther than the last occupant did, men extended their hegemony over not only the means of production, but the means of destruction, thereby gaining control of the physical means of coercion in society, in addition to the mystified political structure.
Armed with these twin powers, legitimate rights and physical force, men began, generation after generation, to alter and extend their rights over people and property, to garner increasing amounts of power, prestige and property. In short, they extended their dominion. We owe the pith of this approach to political economy to the germinal ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, a theoretical perspective that has been built upon by subsequent political anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists.
My thesis is that the seeds of change were established when corporate groups were formed because such structural entities gave aggrandizers an armature within which to maneuver, a justificatory shield for their accumulating processes, their building of ever greater institutions of domination. Did this lead to more conflict? Yes, but it was not the conflict per se that lead to change, but the very process of structure-creation itself.
In other words, domination and the opportunity for selfism were established rule by rule in the formation of corporate institutions. It took time. Rather than being the cause of change, conflict between groups and classes resulted from such formations. This is not to say that conflict was unimportant as a change agent. It was important. There was internal conflict between the scripts of various aspiring élite factions, as well as the conflict between societies. Conflict has been established by social historians as a major mover of history, but I am focusing on the less observable aspects of structuration, the process of creating structures, which laid the seeds for domination.
Why did men form these corporate structures? Once the relationship between humans and the environment reached a point where there was a surplus of wealth, opportunities became apparent to opportunists. At that point, aggrandizers began to construct the substantiating scaffolding by which they would be able to enact their accumulation of wealth, their power over the labor of others. Social construction was about access to resources, both social and material.
A constructionist perspective of sociocultural formations sees social relations as contingent and mediated. They came about as the result of agency and negotiation, the distillate in the process of bargaining, maneuver and manipulation. Rules do not exist in a vacuum. They can be perceived by office-holders as ways to shield their personalistic intentions and means to capitalize on opportunities. If rules block such aggrandizing intentions, then office-holders who wish to advance their personalistic interests while in office are inclined to jettison or change them.

Augmentation of Office in the Neolithic and Beyond

It is not only that office-holders throughout history have used their offices as a base to exploit others, but also there was a natural tendency for an officer to try to increase the power of the office and its privileges once he was installed in his post. As offices were most often filled by aggrandizers who wanted more prestige, power and property, this is understandable. This is so straightforward that I will not belabor the point. One example will suffice.
The Divine King of the Kuba, the nyim, periodically would appoint patricians to posts within his administration. The appointment bestowed upon the office-holder a title, which was a lifetime appointment. The office-holder could only leave office through death. Some offices were high up in the bureaucracy, while others were lower and less powerful. Consequently, those installed in offices beneath their aspirations had great incentive to change the nature of their official privileges and thereby increase their status. The normal strategy for accomplishing this was for the patrician to become the “friend” of the king i.e., to get close to him and win his favor in one manner or another. Professor Vansina (1978) says this approach could result in additional attributes being given to the title he held, so there was a constant shuffling of power within the ranks of the patricians (for more on the Kuba, see chapter 7).
Of course, within a bureaucracy or a political administration, when there is such individual striving, there is pressure for the structure to expand. We will see that in the last chapter where I discuss the state-management system implemented during the Kennedy administration and which grew even more in the Johnson years. Just as leaders throughout history have tried to increase the prestige, power and privileges of office and aspired to convert little chiefdoms into chiefdoms and chiefdoms into kingdoms etc., modern day bureaucrats in the state-management system in Washington DC have grown the war budget to astronomical proportions. This is the outgrowth of greed, individual achievement and ego-fulfillment by officials within the system, the collective result of which is structural growth, the outcome of numerous rule changes, normative formation and the establishment of accepted ways of doing things.
Also, there are different kinds of augmentation. Not all have to do with capturing labor power or property. Some offices may be restricted to accessing prestige. The Zuni of the protohistoric southwest in North America provide an example of notable concentrations of power in the hands of religious officials; yet, archaeologically they show no special possessions. Furthermore, these offices were maintained within only a few select lineages and corporate organization seems to have held down any individualistic aggrandizement on the part of the ritual leaders. Keith Kintigh (2000) indicates that the exclusionary power was likely balanced by strong corporate aspects of Zuni political organization. Moreover, today’s ethnography among the Zuni has revealed a strong corporate ideology that seems to prohibit excessive accumulation of wealth.
Zuni ritual leaders were praised by their peers, but did not, or could not, turn that admiration into high, stratified rank. Yet, office-holding got them prestige. Their personal striving seemed to have been limited by the corporate structure in which they operated.
It appears that the Zuni polity was heterarchical, indicating a lack of one-dimensional hierarchy. Their society demonstrated a presence of multiple and noncongruent sources of power that could come into play in different situations. Heterarchy and multiple strategies of aggrandizement are consistent with diffuse resources, a historical-material condition lacking a single source of wealth that could be accessed by those holding ritual power.
Perhaps the Zuni historical-material conditions were not conducive to using ritual office to acquire property and power over the labor of others, but one thing history shows is that historical-material conditions change and when they do, such offices can become augmented to allow office-holders to exploit in material ways. An office that is benign in one era can become extractive and abusive in another. Opportunism awaits a proper material base.
 
The Rise to Power through Military Service
My ancestors, the Mendoza family, were members of one of Spain's most renowned dynasties, rising to great prominence in the Renaissance. They were the kingmakers behind the rise of the Castilian throne and went on to have great political influence on royalty without being royal themselves. Their rise to prominence is a good example of how the caballeros of early rural Spain were able to maintain privileged access to royal power and in the process amass a great fortunes and the highest prestige in the land.
The lineage had its beginning as an élite family in the province of Álava (Basque: Araba), a traditional Basque province in Northern Iberia (Nader 1979: Chapter 2). They incorporated themselves into high Castilian society by means of the fueros (royal charters) during the reign of Alfonso XI (1312-1350)
Prior to the Mendoza family’s entrance into Castilian society, Álava had been a battleground for centuries with incessant feuding between the local seigniorial families. The first historical evidence for such feuding goes as far back as the tenth century. Around 1332, these Mendoza caballeros moved to Castile and incorporated themselves into the Castilian fighting force, climbing the ladder of rewards available to those who gave military service to the Crown. These rough-and-ready hidalgos operated under the Medieval concept of res publica – that the upper class held a responsibility to support the royal family in their governance of Castile. In this capacity, the Mendozas became military entrepreneurs and were considered vasallos del rey (vassals of the king), receiving horses, income and lands in return for outstanding military service. Some were rewarded with posts in the royal administration, with their respective incomes and perquisites.
Accordingly, being attached to power was an avenue to holding formal positions in officialdom. Some of these royal administrative posts included: the admirals of Castilian fleets; military governors, chief notaries of the provinces and royal administrators of the cities. Military governors guarded the cities, royal fortresses, walls, towers, and bridges of the cities, as well as the royal castles and fortified towers of the countryside. Fighting for the Crown was their gateway into corporate groups, since the Mendoza hidalgos also received positions in three of the corporate jurisdictions: the municipalities, the Honrado Concejo de la Mesta (gild providing tolls for the passage of sheep) and the military orders. All of these memberships provided the Mendozas with status and income. Military service, therefore, allowed the Mendozas to move from the outside to the inside of officialdom and the organized and stable associations of high society.
In the offices they held, the Mendoza caballeros exercised judicial, executive, legislative and military functions. Thus they were judges in criminal cases within the jurisdictions (señoríos) of their public offices and judges of civil and criminal cases in their private señoríos. Thus, when the Mendozas moved into high society in Castile, they became participants in the public life of the kingdom.
The first Mendoza to appear in the service of the Castilian Crown was Gonzalo Yáñez de Mendoza. He fought against the Muslims at the battle of Algeciras and served as montero mayor (chief huntsman) to Alfonso XI (1311-1350). When he moved to the Castilian province of Guadalajara, and settled in the city of Guadalajara he became a regidor (city councilman) and married into a very prominent and wealthy family there. His wife was the sister of Iñigo López de Orozco, also a caballero from Álava who made his fortunes in the service of the Crown. Thus, élites were linked together through marriage to others with common interests to form a cohesive ruling class.
The power and prestige of the lineage would continue. Gonzalo's son, Pedro González de Mendoza (d. 1385), was particularly adept, as were many in the family, at choosing the winning side at a propitious moment. Using his family name and influence he too became established as one of the leaders in the Castilian class of rich and powerful families in fourteenth-century Castile. He did this during King Pedro the Cruel’s violent reign (1334 - 1369), receiving privileges and income in return for military service. But when Enrique de Trastámara, the half-brother of Pedro the Cruel, challenged the unpopular king, Mendoza threw his support to Enrique and promptly received extensive lands and privileges from him. Enrique also gave Mendoza two strategic towns north of Madrid, Hita and Buitrago.
At first Mendoza’s support of Enrique was rather tenuous, but was gained an ardent and solidifying commitment at Nájera when Mendoza's uncle, Iñigo López de Orozco, was treasonously murdered by Pedro and Mendoza, along with his band of fellow soldiers of fortune, were imprisoned and held for random. From that time on, Mendoza fervently supported the Trastámara dynasty and its politics and allied himself with other Enriquistas who had undergone the same sort of conversion at Nájera. Helen Nader notes that generations of Mendoza sons would bear the name their martyr, Iñigo López and the sense of unity created at their Nájera confinement was to unite these freelancers into a tight-knit core within the highest ranks of Castilian society.
Pedro continued to threaten Enrique until the latter killed him in 1369 and consolidated his power in the peninsula through the help of Mendoza and other loyal caballeros, whom he rewarded for their services. Enrique's rewards formed the core of the Mendoza patrimony and in the fifteenth century, they were to become the basis for the greatest fortune in Trastámara Castile. Clearly, being near to power was a rewarding enterprise.
The Mendoza fortune was thus built upon their adherence to the Trastámara cause at a critical moment. As military entrepreneurs, they offered their services to the most profitable cause and in so doing acted as a powerful political force in Castilian history. As their power and wealth grew during the fifteenth century, the mere fact of their choosing one side over another became enough to tip the balance in favor of the parties to whom they through their political weight.
In The Scripting of Domination in Medieval Catalonia: An Anthropological View I wrote about how Catalan caballeros first used the sword to take land and then used the pen to fabricate deeds to secure their ownership of those lands and to create serfs of the peasants working them. The sword and pen are two instruments of coalescing control over power, prestige and property, but the marriage ring can be considered a third. War got the Mendozas to the heights of Castilian society and marriage sealed the family’s place in Spanish history. The leaders of the Trastámara revolution secured their political alliances through marriage ties. The extended family that grew out of the Nájera group, those who were captured and imprisoned by King Pedro, formed by a unique common historical experience, became a solid ruling class, what Helen Nader called a “closed corporation within the Castilian aristocracy.”
During the fifteenth century, the Nájera prisoners and their descendants would intermarry with other powerful Castilian families and would advantageously ally themselves with a variety of political forces. But throughout the Trastámara period (1469-1516), the offspring of the Nájera prisoners, many of them Mendozas, continued to be a tight-knit interlaced network of élites who were set apart from other Castilian aristocrats by their mutual ancestry and by being inextricably bound up with the trauma at Nájera.
In the class-based ethos of Trastámara Spain, it was the monarch’s place to demand loyalty from families such as the Mendozas, but the kings also felt a need to reward their reliable followers with material mercedes (gifts). In his first grant of lands to Pedro González de Mendoza, King Enrique was cementing a vital relationship with a powerful family, one that had become so by providing military service to kings.
The very origins of their dynasty contractually bound the Trastámara kings to the Nájera prisoners and their descendants, especially the Mendoza family. The natural consequences of this fact for the Mendozas were enormous. From the time Pedro González de Mendoza committed himself to the Enriquista cause at Nájera, the family became the pillar of the ruling dynasty, as well as the prime beneficiaries of Trastámara stipends. With the Mendozas at the center, the wealth of royal rewards was kept within a small band of élites through intermarriage. With these marriages, the Mendozas built a set of connections with other Enriquistas, links that bound Pedro González de Mendoza’s descendants to the political party that had triumphed in the civil war. Understandably, the Mendozas came to hold the highest political and military offices of the kingdom.
The eldest son of Pedro González de Mendoza, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza continued this profitable policy of active military and political support of the new royal dynasty. As Admiral of Castile, he rendered valuable military services in the wars against Portugal. In the power struggle during the minority of Enrique III (1390-1406), he sided with the winning side by allying himself with his uncles, Pedro López de Ayala and Juan Hurtado de Mendoza. In so doing he became del consejo del rey (counselor of the king). Sometime before 1395, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza received the patronage of the city offices of Guadalajara as a merced. Additionally, he held the hereditary right to name the city's procuradores to the Cortes (legislators to the legislature). Henceforth he and his descendants were able to dominate the politics of the city of Guadalajara and the surrounding province.
When his career was cut short by death in 1404, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was reputed to be the richest man in Castile, having inherited a large fortune from his father to which he added large tracts of land. Also, he received estates as mercedes from both the kings Juan I (r. 1379-1390) and Enrique III (1390- 1406) that increased his holdings in the provinces of Guadalajara and Madrid. He also extended the family's interests into Asturias by marrying a second time to Leonor de la Vega, in 1387. Leonor was the sole heiress of the vast Vega fortune, and brought extensive seigneurial Asturian lands into the Mendoza holdings, including sheep-grazing lands, salt mines, and seaports, the latter becoming great sources of Mendoza income in a period of extensive wool trade between Castile and Flanders.
But the marriage was also a political move, being a renewal of the alliance system which the family had formed with the Enriquista nobility –the first supporters of the Trastámara cause. These connections were further strengthened by the second marriage of the admiral's eldest sister, Juana, to Alfonso Enríquez, a nephew of Enrique II. The intertwining of relations with the top families in Spain served the Mendoza family well. Alfonso Enríquez succeeded Mendoza as Admiral of Castile and this office became a hereditary right held by the Enríquez family, which gave a powerful connection for Mendozas throughout the fifteenth century, long before their cousin, Fernando the Catholic became king.
Pedro González de Mendoza and his son, Admiral Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, transformed the Mendoza lineage from a provincial military family into a wealthy, aristocratic dynasty that dominated the entire province of Guadalajara and its chief city of the same name. Mendozas held the highest national offices, enjoying close family ties to a powerful network of the country’s highest families, including the royal family itself. All of this was accomplished through their participation in national affairs, including military service, personal influence at court and high national office.
Nader’s early work on the Mendoza family focused on how its men strategized to move up in Castilian society, in terms of prestige, power and property. In 2003 Nader turned her attention to the Mendoza women with a book of essays by Renaissance scholars entitled: Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650. These essays explore the lives of powerful women whose lineage in the Mendoza family gave them very high status within an overarching patriarchal society designed to keep women from public life. Each of the influential and literary women discussed in this volume handled her rank differently. Strikingly, their disquiet was not dissimilar from the concerns of feminists today. Spanning the two centuries between Juana Pimentel, a widow who was skilled at manipulating the patronage system to her own ends, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, who rejected both a life cloistered in a convent and marriage in favor of missionary work, this book reveals a multifaceted society in which women were limited by laws and a male-centered culture, and yet their social status and the Mendoza name made those laws negotiable. These women found that their personal agendas had a broad societal impact because of their upbringing and the power of rank. They were, each in a unique way, able to challenge the laws of the land and patriarchal assumptions about women's inferiority.
Here we have seen the case of aggrandizing males in the Mendoza family positioning themselves near the Castilian King and providing him with military service and unflinching loyalty in order to rise in society to the highest level. Admittedly, the Mendozas switched sides when it seemed in their best interest to do so e.g., in the support of the contender to the throne, Enrique de Trastámara. It proved to be the right move and, once again, they were highly connected with the best families in the land and the Crown.
In making these alliances the Mendoza men built a great fortune, occupied the highest posts in the royal administration and established the Mendoza name in Spanish history. We also see that high rank and a famous name helped several Mendoza women have influence in a male-centered world where their feminist ideas would not have had purchase without the leverage of their lineage. It is a case of strategizing men and women working their way in a world of norms, some of which had to be altered, ignored and challenged, sometimes with a sword, at others as office-holders and, on the female side, with a pen.

Scripting Information for Power: The Case of the Early Popes

With the emergence of a storable, stealable surplus information control became vital to those wishing to manage society. It is a truism that information is power. Throughout history part of the illicit power capacity of office-holders lay in their extra-office networks. These networks allowed power seekers a flow of information and influence. Along these lines flowed information that could be subversive to the stated functions of office, thereby undermining the goals for which the structure was designed. Along such network avenues corrosive vested interests could flow into the official structure.
After the Agricultural Revolution, control and compartmentalization of information, avoidance of outside evaluation, circumvention or alteration of regular procedures and selection of personnel to be involved in any undertaking led to the development of advantaged élites. Office could be used to harbor secrets, which could be strategically leaked or ceremonially paraded for political purposes, thus shaping the scriptwriting process. In any case, the images transmitted to the public were filtered by office-holders. The key objective usually was the maintenance of autonomy from public inspection or outside control in order to maintain privileged access to power, property and prestige.
This was partly accomplished by harnessing information or maintaining the right to access information coming from Deity, which took various forms – God, the ancestors, a sacred oracle and so forth. In this way, élites set themselves up to define and control social, economic and political reality for the masses. To accomplish this, various forms of propaganda machines were put in place. This was meant to reduce transparency and create a docile population.
This was done early on when chiefs claimed to have a divine oracle, but we find such behavior in the Middle Ages as well. For instance, the legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire was based on the idea that the pope and his bishops were the recipients of the authority of Jesus and his apostles, a mystification called apostolic succession.
Rome’s version of things was, for the early church, only one’s bishop’s script, however and much of that script is questionable and some of it is a forgery e.g., the Donation of Constantine and the “False Decretals” (see below). Much of the religious energy of the time actually took place in North Africa and Rome’s rise to prominence could not have been easily foreseen by those struggling to put together Christianity in some coherent form after the execution of Peter and Paul by the Romans and their burial in Rome.
In fact this materialization of the Christian religion was the most important fact in swinging the seat of power to Rome and transforming the Bishop of Rome into il papa, the pope. The graves of these two apostles became a focal point exploited by Roman popes. As Duffy writes:

Christianity all over the Roman world in the first and second centuries was in a state of violent creative ferment. What would come to be seen as mainstream orthodoxy coexisted alongside versions of the Gospel which would soon come to seem outrageously deviant, ‘heretical’. But the outré and the orthodox were not always easy to distinguish at first sight, and the early Christian community in Rome had more than its fair share of competing versions of the Gospel (2006:12).

Early popes had a difficult start, some being dragged through the streets, beaten, their eyes gouged out, their tongues ripped from their bodies and others simply assassinated in their beds. Finally history saw the birth of papal Rome and the pope emerged not only as the head of Christianity in the West, but also the equivalent of a medieval potentate – a prince that operated not unlike the other counts and kings of the era.
This began with the reign of Pope Damasus I (366-383) who perfectly embodied the growing power of the papacy and its mounting grandeur. To survive the internecine competition of Roman politics and the machinations of other churchmen Damasus had to be a ruthless powerbroker, one who would not hesitate to mobilize the city police and the Christian mob to back up his rule. To win election he had been able to deploy squads of thugs, the notoriously hard-boiled Roman fossores, who massacred 137 followers of the rival pope in street fighting that ended in a bloody siege of what is now the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Machiavelli would have been proud of the good pope.
After Damasus, self-consciously subsequent popes of the eternal city put together a series of documents that elevated to the occupant of the Throne of St. Peter to be the church’s supreme lawgiver, one claiming plenitudo potestatis. The pope had to compete with other powerful Medieval princes who had power, so the lawmakers of the papacy wanted to have the greatest power possible in order to deal with other potentates.
This princely papacy saw an early acme in the reign of Pope Leo “The Great” (440-461). Leo saw the pope as the head of an imperium, which was not of this world and which superceded any secular claim to hegemony. The “papa-cide” wasn’t finished but little by little the power of the Prince of Rome coalesced and by the reign of Pope Gregory (590-604) the church had become the largest single landowner in the West.
Landowning was one strength; documents were another. If you are going to have power, a script is helpful. During the papacy of Zachary (741-752) the Frankish King, Pepin (r. 751-768), made what is now known as the Donation of Pepin, whereby he undertook to return to the pope the Duchy of Rome, the Exarchate of Ravenna and the other cities and lands captured by the Lombards. Pepin made war in Italy, defeated the Lombards and fulfilled his promise, depositing a document detailing the donation on the grave of St. Peter. A Papal State had been inaugurated.
However, the Eastern Church was not happy with this elevation of the Roman Pope to such princely heights and seemingly Pope Zachary felt the need for more documentation of his supremacy. A forgery was in order and was duly fabricated by papal scribes, called the Donation of Constantine:

This document purported to be a solemn legal enactment of the first Christian Emperor. In it, Constantine recounts the legend (accepted as historical fact in the eighth century) of his healing from leprosy during his baptism by Pope Sylvester I. In gratitude for this miracle, and in recognition of Sylvester’s inheritance of the power of Peter to bind and loose, Constantine sets the Pope and his successors for ever above all other bishops and churches throughout the world. He gives him also ‘all the prerogatives of our supreme imperial position and the glory of our authority’. Constantine tells us how he had himself handed Sylvester his imperial crown, ‘which we have transferred from our own head’, but the Pope in respect for his priestly tonsure, chose not to wear it. Instead Constantine gave him a cap of honour, the camalaucum… (Duffy 2006:88-89).

Papal primacy was, therefore, counterfeited into reality. Based on this fraudulent document the pope received the city of Rome and “all the provinces, districts and cities of Italy and the Western regions.” In other words, it was documented that il papa was now the Prince of Europe, the dominant political and religious force in the West. He was not only princeps but also Emperor of Christendom.
As “Emperor” he could now install kings. In fact, Pope John VIII (872-882) anointed Charles the Bald (875-877) and Charles the Fat (879-888). Papal authority also grew in church affairs and the pope, standing on his faux documents, rose to become the ultimate source of canon law. But it seems that one major forgery was not enough. About 850 there appeared a series of letters of early popes, now known as the “False Decretals.” These forged letters were mixed in with real ones, some garbled documents, genuine records of council meetings and the Donation of Constantine to form the documentary foundation of papal authority:

Their systematic presentation of a massive body of authoritative ecclesiastical legislation (however dubious some of it might be) made the collection of the most often cited reference-books of the medieval Church. The role of the papacy as the fountain of all jurisdiction in the Church, even that of councils, already widely accepted, gradually became axiomatic (Duffy 2006:98-99).

This was about fabricating power and with these documents the pope became supreme judge and legislator of Christendom and a princely influence in secular affairs (saeculum). For example, Pope Nicholas I (858-867), the last pope to be called “The Great,” felt that no synod or council had binding force without his approval and that no bishop might be deposed without his agreement. Now all decisions as pope had the force of law and secular monarchs were on earth to use their military might to protect Rome and the man sitting on the Throne of St. Peter.
It goes without saying that not all the great prelates of the church agreed with this interpretation of papal sway. Nicholas and ensuing popes often had to bring high ecclesiastical dignitaries to heel. Local churches, like provinces in the secular world, did not always want to give up their established laws. The power of the papacy was to suffer under such attacks from within, the obstinacy of kings, Roman politics, papal indiscretions and other problems that beset succeeding popes, but based on the documents safely stored in papal vaults, the supremacy of the Vicar of Rome survived through the ages.
Power throughout Christendom was enacted based on such claims, which of course no lay member of the church or empire had the knowledge or power to refute. Men claiming to be holy and anointed by Peter and Constantine through the Roman Pope, like the church apparitor or sheriff, the official of the ecclesiastical courts who could summon people to appear before them, had great sway over the minds of European Christians in the Middle Ages. He served the summons, arrested an accused person and, in an ecclesiastico-civil procedure, took physical possession of persons and property on behalf of the judge. Claiming to be called of God, he acted in very poleconomic ways. As happened with some papal property, appritors’ confiscations sometimes found their way into private pockets. In fact, writs and canon laws that provided mystifying power to the Pope of Rome and his churchmen were the result of a long struggle by successive popes and decretists in a very human search for prestige, power and property.

Mystification & Information Control among the Inka

Let's look at how mystification and information manipulation worked in the Inka Empire, based in Peru. Their feasts were designed to cement the relationship between the state and most of its subjects. Inka displays of ritual materialized the power and wealth of the state on a grand scale. After conquering new territory, Inka rulers alienated all agricultural lands and reallocated them to members of their own kin-based corporate group and other specially chosen families. This was supposed to be seen as a demonstration of the benevolence of the Inka State.
In granting land rights back to the community, the Inkas legitimated their rights to labor and service.
Corvée crews formed the military, constructed facilities, temples and storehouses; and built roads to tie Inka centers together. In return for these required services, Inka rulers hosted work feasts, providing workers with food and chichi.
Excavations at Huanuco Pampa suggest that state hospitality took place on a massive scale, designed of course to maintain loyalty to the Inka State. This Inka center was located far from agricultural lands and local centers of population, yet its many storehouses contained abundant foodstuffs. Central to Huanuco Pampa was a nineteen-hectare plaza, a setting for the feasts described by early Spanish chroniclers. In the plaza's excavated assemblage, the dominant ceramic vessel form was the aribalo, a large, high-necked liquid-storage vessel probably used to serve chichi in public ceremonies.
Thus Inka feasts were attempts to mystify the nature of Inka rulers and bolster the state's authority. In hosting feasts, they ensured that rights to community labor, formerly a political and economic prerogative of local élites, would instead legitimately belong to the state.
Because, as a tributary state, the Inka Empire did not directly control subsistence production and because it depended upon an extensive bureaucracy, the materialization of ideology appears to have played a key role as a source of mystified power. Inka feasts reinforced the ties of reciprocity that linked the empire's distant, largely self-sufficient subject communities to the center of power, Cuzco and to the institutions of Inka religion.
At the same time, this was an ideology of mind coercion, mystifying power relationships and legitimating the rulers. This hierarchical character is best illustrated by the rites and festivals held at the royal court in Cuzco. They were organized to observe religious occasions and to celebrate military triumphs. Participants included successful military leaders and provincial élites who feasted on special food and beer and often received gifts of fine metal, elaborate textiles or precious stones. Chroniclers described events that included ritual sacrifices of humans, llamas and other animals. In effect, the state was trading maize, beer, gifts, food and entertainment for authority.
At the same time, mystification, coercion and military action were integral elements of this materialized ideology. For example, as punishment, two Qolla lords who had led an uprising were flayed and drums were made of their hides. These drums were then played in the celebrations in Cuzco following their defeat and murder. The symbolism is clear.
Royal festivals mystified and perpetuated the sacred role of Inka rulers. Essentially, ceremonies were politco-mystical events that elevated the emperor's position, equating him with Inti, the Sun God. Ancestor worship was a central theme in their religion and myths had the ruling family descending directly from Inti. Religion and myth augmented the political authority of the emperor, giving him supernatural identity, since the ancestors and living members of the royal family were considered divine.
Another form of information manipulation and objectification of mystical ideas can be seen in the mummified bodies of dead emperors, which were cared for by their descendants. They took these mummies to feasts and publically provided them with offerings. The idea was to present a concrete link between present rulers and those of the past in a public context.
Materialized ideology was meant to create shared experience and to perpetuate the unquestioned power of the state, especially among unruly and rebellious groups. In the provinces, large feasts emphasized the state's generosity for peasant laborers as a way of justifying their labor duties to the state. These feasts were also a time when the workers could see their rulers, attired in splendor. When the Head of State (the Inka) traveled to the provinces, he went forth on a golden litter surrounded by emblems of the sun and moon and other sacred symbols of the royal lineage.
Festivals in the capital city, Cuzco, were aimed at provincial élites and others who regularly visited the capital. At such events information was imparted. That was the ceremonial aspect to cybernetic formulation, but to further integrate provincial leaders more completely, Inka policy required that their sons spend time in Cuzco to learn the Inka language and to become familiar with Inka customs and culture. That was the educational aspect of information dissemination by the state.
Thus, we see that the Inka not only used mystification to link the Head of State to the Sun God, but they also held regular ceremonies at which their ideology of superiority could be displayed to impress those that might think otherwise, usually powerful provincials. This was designed to hold the whole empire together.
When we look at states like the Inka Empire or Ancient Egypt, it is relatively easy to see how the leaders and their mythmakers created a mystified image of the state. But culture itself, as it has evolved from a myriad of sources over time, can mystify. Beliefs can obscure realities. For instance, the American cultural emphasis on individualism hides underlying structural causes of poverty. It becomes an oft repeated myth that in America anyone can “make it” by working hard. This has become known as the “Horatio Alger myth” and is simplistically trotted out by those who find it a useful way of dealing with the complexities of poverty in the richest country on earth. It is easy to say: “They are poor because they don’t work hard.” I wonder how that goes down with the worker who spends his entire day working three minimum wage jobs only to find that he can never get out of poverty.
Culture can be a tool. Mystifications such as American individualism are part of the general culture, but they can also be used as explanatory tools by individuals and groups. They can be picked up and utilized to explain and at the same time obfuscate true underlying causes. This is the work of those trying to justify their positions in an exploitative structure.
Let me give you one example of this from medieval Catalonia. After a time of rampage by castle-lords between 1020 and 1060, the Count of Barcelona and the landed élite began to formulate a feudal system to firm up the extreme hardships (mali usatici) the riotous paladin lords had inflicted on the peasants at the tip of a sword. These tyrannical exactions and oppressive services that had been forced on a more or less free peasantry had to be justified in some way.
The Barcelona Count and the aristocrats of the hinterland put their heads together and came up with the myth that the peasants deserved such harsh treatment because their ancestors had sided with the infidel Moors when they invaded the region centuries before. That this was a total fabrication did not seem to inhibit the very men who were, according to the aristocratic ethos, supposed to protect and defend those who toiled for them in the fields. This fairy tale, trumped up at the end of the eleventh century helped to institutionalize serfdom, which lasted for centuries in Catalonia.
By the eleventh century such practices by the ruling class had a long history. With the advent of the Neolithic Revolution spindoctors purposefully began to create mystifications that had poleconomic results. They, and the leaders they served, knew what they were doing, as we saw with the Yokut-Mono chiefs and their shamans or with the lies perpetrated by Catalan élites or with the mystifying ceremonies of the Inka. But much of the mythologizing of office and leadership was more mundane and less colorful. It was inherent in the process of creating structures such as chiefships, sodalities, gilds, temple-complexes and other corporations that began to deal in the control of wealth and labor. Officialdom, in time, seemed to have always been there and its inner workings were impenetrable.
In creating secret codes of office, and rules of succession to office and privilege, men created walls that blocked most of the people from concentrated information. In that blockage, or the means of obstruction, lay power. Undoubtedly these early office-holders knew this. They understood that the means of obstruction were also the means of obscuration or mystification, that in order to control the behavior of others, especially in the process of doing work in the everyday world, they needed unassailable leverage. That leverage was to be found in authoritative codes and concentrated secret information.
These codes, the customs that came to be associated with office, were a means of mystifying the minds of others, a way of making positions authoritative. Coming from Latin mysterium the verb "to mystify" means to perplex the mind of another, to bewilder, to make mysterious or obscure. To obscure, comes from the Latin obscurus, meaning to make something dark, dim or indistinct; to conceal or hide by covering. In pursuit of prestige, power and property office-holders learned to do both.
The key mystification of office, one that occurs in various forms in different societies, was the fabrication of a link between office and some higher authority, usually Deity, but sometimes simply previous rulers or, as in the Inka case, both. Its power rested in holding secrets, of powers not available to the general populace, of operating behind closed doors. With the lack of transparency, office-holders found power, the ability to be the influencer but not perceived as such; the supremacy to command, but to be perceived as merely passing on the commands of Deity or doing what had always been done.

Mystification in the Sisala Gerontocracy

A created office has a force of its own. It affects the mentality of the individual, as do all social formations that precede that individual in time. In the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim (1947 [1915]) theorized that in worshiping Deity, humans are in fact worshiping the social order, society itself. Thus the codes of formal office are built on a natural and unavoidable base of association. That is, humans live in association one with another and thus they recognize the power of the group over the individual. Officers represent the group and are ipso facto impressive. Upon this base, the Neolithic leader slowly fabricated ideas and rules that authenticated his right to direct and channel the society’s power over the individual.
Whereas in an egalitarian society that power is diffuse, in redistributive societies it begins to be concentrated in office and directed by office-holders. During the last twelve millennia that direction has taken place from behind fabricated walls of customs and codes and has taken the form of symbolic messages from on high.
Let me give you an example of the means of obscuration as it operates in Sisala society, which is a classic redistributive political economy, one in which I did fieldwork. In that socially constructed world, Sisala men have created a patriarchal order, a gerontocracy that rests on bundles of mystical ideas that are played out behaviorally in two key institutions: vugung divination and ancestral sacrifice or kpaarE. The key player in this drama of domination is the lineage headman, the jachiking-tiina. He leads the main corporate group, the lineage (jachiking), the members of which work together to produce food, fuel and water, in other words to produce a living. As their headman, the jachiking-tiina has the duty and right to direct the farm work, distribute the harvested crops and regulate their rate of consumption. He does this by virtue of having become the senior male in the genealogically senior kaala or household within the lineage.
The role of the headman is wrapped in the fabric of authority, which has devolved to him in the form of two privileged activities: (1) the right to consult a diviner (vugira) to obtain messages from the ancestors about problems in the lineage or those affecting the lineage; and (2) the privilege to preside at ancestral sacrifices where, based on information received in divination, he placates the ancestors who are thought to retain, as the living-dead, the right and responsibility to keep the living members of their lineage on the wongbiing-titi, the true path, following the moral codes of their society.
In cybernetic terms, this male-constructed ideology claims that there is special information in the supernatural realm that only senior males can access using the divinatory process. If junior males or females are in need of such information, they have to access it through the headman of their natal lineage, their husband’s lineage or through another senior male who is appropriately involved with the problem that generated the need for occult information.
The sequence of events is usually as follows: a misfortune occurs, a death, illness or calamity in the lineage. Such misfortunes are not thought to happen accidentally, as all mishaps are seen to be caused by a willful ancestor. Furthermore, it is believed that, left unattended, this misfortune will fester and multiply. To deal with the illness or catastrophe, the headman consults a diviner who has secret information that allows him to contact the spiritual world to get answers to the questions: "what caused this mishap and what do we have to do about it?"
Almost invariably, the divinatory verdict will direct the headman to command someone in the lineage to perform a piacular sacrifice to the ancestors, that is a sacrifice of an animal or animals to bring about the remission of a sin or offence against the moral order (wongbiing-titi).
After the divination, the headman assembles the parish, the ritual community involved in the divinatory verdict, usually lineage members, but it can also involve affines and outsiders, depending on the nature of the offense. At the sacrifice the headman will outline the nature of the crime, the verdict of the ancestors and the punishment. The deviant will then make a speech in which s/he confesses errant ways, acknowledges the validity of the rules of the moral order and makes a blood sacrifice to the ancestors on the appointed family shrine.
Let us analyze this sequence of behaviors in cybernetic terms, that is, by looking for information, the storage of information and information flows.
In the divinatory process just described information exists in the form of ideas, fabricated in the past, built up over time to be customary understandings that are passed on orally and through redundancy e.g., young men watching older men perform divinations and sacrifices. Women are usually absent from such rites, thus there is a whole body of information defined as vital to the control of health and wellbeing that is blocked to women and to very young men. However the latter, as they age, will gain access to this information. Women are structurally and permanently prohibited from accessing the information, hence they are relegated to a timeless state of dependence on the gerontocratic order of things.
The information of the gerontocracy constitutes a body of ideas about supernatural governance and causation that is, by right and privilege of office, carried out on earth by certain ordained men. The belief is that to ignore this information causes pain, suffering, conflict and misfortune in life. Heeding this information leads one down the path of truth (wongbiing-titi) to happiness and prosperity.
The information is stored, ultimately, in the minds of senior men in this oral society, which has lacked the written word. Yet there are bundles of information, not unlike documents. In the diviner's bag there are code-objects that have been fashioned out of various and sundry articles found in everyday life e.g., corn cobs, pieces of gourd, bundles of cloth and the like. Based on shape, color and number, these code objects are interpreted to have meaning, just as words and phrases do in the literate world.
Meaning is also embedded in the redundant or stylized movements of the diviner's wand as s/he carries out his or her routine of divination. For example, if the wand touches the forearm of the client that indicates that his problem is to be found in his close kin, the vaadongoo. If the wand points to each of the client’s nipples, it signifies the involvement of a woman.
In this fashion the code objects of the diviner’s bag and the movements of his or her wand spell out the problem and solution for the client, both of which are firmly grounded in the fabricated ideas about the proper way of life, the wongbiing-titi.
We can see that information exists in the minds of the gerontocratic office-holders and is embedded in artifacts and customary movements of the diviner's wand, which are merely extensions of mental constructs in the mind of the diviner and the male client. This information flows, theoretically, from the ancestors to the living. In the world of the living, the information flows from the diviner to the client who then conveys it to the group, though the Sisala diviner only communicates this indirectly to the client through interpretation of sequences of code-objects and wand movements. The diviner never knows exactly what the problem is. S/he merely offers a generic solution that can be fit to almost any malaise.
Post-divinatory sacrifice continues the programmed processing of information, which is then sent back to the world of the dead, completing the cybernetic circle. This circular flow of information is brought about by customary behaviors that have been going on for eons.
I contend that this information has accumulated over time to form customary ways of thinking and behaving, but that this is not a benign body of ideas. It has poleconomic implications. It helps senior males control wealth and labor. This contrived and guarded information is part of the system of governance I have called the Sisala gerontocracy.
As with other social formations created after the Agricultural Revolution, this information is more than political in nature; it also has economic consequences. Material goods and labor are controlled and allocated based on the control and dissemination of mystified information. As such, this cybernetic system is the heart and soul of the Sisala political economy or gerontocracy.
The innovation of Sisala divination and its uses to fabricate patriarchy was the result of a series of innovations that took place in the past. Is the result of innovation always adaptive, or can it also be maladaptive? Clearly, it can be either. One has to ask: adaptive for whom? I suspect that, overall, control of labor and its products by gerontocrats was a devise that spread risk and, as such, may have helped groups through times of scarcity, of which there are many still today in Sisalaland. But if you approach the exclusive control of divination from the standpoint of women’s rights, for example, the answer would be different. No woman can access occult information about their health, their children or any important matter in their lives without going through the auspices of a senior male – their headman, father, husband or even the own son of the woman. Institutions are rarely entirely benign. They can be beneficial for some (usually those of the cohort or class who created them in the past) and detrimental for others.
An innovation is information. Innovations were made through the Paleolithic but the information was available to all. When some innovative hunter discovered how to make poison to put on the tips of arrows, that information spread from hunter to hunter. Hoarding that information would have been counterproductive for the inventor. Sharing it brought him more security because others using the poison would have bagged more game.
With the Neolithic development of a storable, stealable surplus, hoarding information became good for individuals, families and corporate groups, especially officers, as I described above for Sisala gerontocrats. At that point in history, the armature of office was fabricated by men intent on harnessing information within a tight-knit cadre – the leadership or privileged élite.
In the creation of formal institutions, especially chiefship and corporate groups (sodalities), information was monopolized and encoded in privileged ways. The WWWebster Dictionary defines monopoly as "exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action" or "exclusive possession or control," which is the opposite of democratic access to information. Monopolies became one of the lynchpins of the political economy in the Neolithic, just as we saw modern day Sisala headmen monopolizing access to occult information. Neolithic men moved to monopolize information, wealth, labor and valuable land and resources. As trade developed in Bronze Age Europe, societies became more stratified and rules were created that gave to a privileged few monopolies over salt, metal, trade in prestige items and other commodities.
I see office-holders having used in the past (and using today) the cloak of office to create new rules that they define as being advantageous for themselves and their backers. It would seem that Timothy Earle has come to similar conclusions:
…the evolution of larger, more complex social forms is associated with a greater emphasis on the rights of property as opposed to the rights of person. In terms familiar to anthropologists, this transition shifted the nature of rights from those vested in a social persona (and determined by the roles and statuses that an individual holds within a social structure) to those vested in material things (firms, estates, and wealth). In fact, this transition is not a replacement of one system of rights by another but the creation of additional rights that become attached to property that can be transferred by allocation or alienation (italics are mine; 1998:94).

The Neolithic ushered in a gusher of jurality – rights, rules and ideas about ownership of material goods and about who should lead society. It was an information explosion that generated a materialized ideology. That is, leaders invented objects (such as shrines) and rituals (such as s divination) to guide behavior along chosen paths. A materialized ideology molded individual beliefs for collective social action. It organized and gave meaning to the external world through the tangible, shared forms of ceremonies, symbols, monumental architecture and writing. Materialization of ideology was an invented and strategic process in which leaders allocated resources to strengthen and validate institutions of élite control.
Social and economic rights and duties became materialized in the Neolithic. Certain material objects came to symbolize poleconomic power. They can be seen as repositories of meaning or information. As such, they could serve as broadcasting devices, telling others of the power of the office-holder. The symbolic order became grounded in material emblems. These emblems of ownership in Hawaiian chiefdoms were of two kinds, as described by Tim Earle:

First, within the cultural landscape, property rights in land became formalized, given permanency, in the constructed, productive facilities: the irrigation systems, the fish ponds, and the fenced house lots. The landscape was carefully marked by the walls and other constructions built by social labor organized by the chiefs' managers. The managers then allocated use rights in these very specific facilities of production. Who a person was, how he supported his family, and how he sustained his chiefs were written in the landscape by the community's own labor activities. The symbolic order was grounded and subsumed within the everyday practice of subsistence labor in the fields of the chiefs. Land tenure was transformed by the control over social labor used to construct a cultural landscape.
Second, the identity and corresponding political rights of these chiefs were bound up in objects, frequently called "prestige goods." These goods were manufactured and distributed within the political economy, which was closely controlled by the ruling paramount. The ownership and wearing of goods such as the feathered cloaks defined the political status of a person and correspondingly the person's rights and obligations within the chiefdom. Access to the status objects and to the institutionalization of hierarchical relationships became controlled through the political economy. The social relations of the chiefdom were transformed by control over attached specialists and the symbolic products of their labor (1998:112).

In the Neolithic transition, material things became important symbols of status. We see an increase in burial goods as the Neolithic proceeds. And we also see people being treated as things. For instance, a Siberian Pazyryk chief was accompanied to the next life by his wife, servants, horses, chariots and his personal effects e.g., woven rugs. We find the same type of elevated status in Bronze Age burials from the Shang Dynasty in China where chieftains were buried with chariots, horses and human retainers who had been bound and decapitated.
Not only did Neolithic leaders begin to tie Deity and the supernatural to themselves, but also to the material manifestations of office. In the Sisala example above, the paraphernalia of divination – the diviner’s bag, wand, code-objects and shrine – can only be accessed by the extraordinary event of a mental break with reality. Usually this takes the form of going insane, often in the forest, which is associated with the supernatural in Sisala culture. Authorized members of the divining cult then cure the insane person and s/he is given the tools of the trade. In tying the creation of such objects to the supernatural, and by positing them to be the exclusive means of contacting that world in lineage matters, such materializations take on great significance in the minds of community members.
Fabricated ideas and information that cannot be accessed or reproduced by others, once in existence, have great power, especially when there is some tangible thing connected to such ideas. Thus, we find leaders creating official paraphernalia, shrines, relics and reliquaries, temples, palaces (often in conjunction with temples), sacred groves or mounds – all sorts of materializations of officialdom. This helped early leaders communicate their special nature to the people they wish to control.
And we have seen materialization in recent history. In Mein Kampf, Hitler said "the principle that once made the Prussian army the most marvelous instrument of the German people" could be incorporated into a new political order, providing it with "hardness" based on the idea of "authority of every leader towards below and responsibility towards above." Here, a military model from the “glorious past” is used to provide an ideological backbone to Hitler's dreams. And these ideas were materialized in the military uniforms, lightening bolts on the labels, massive flags and banners, enormous rallies, the "Heil Hitler salute, the swastika and so forth.
Such iconic symbols, no matter how irrational, are more likely to move people to action, than strict reason. In my opinion, people are essentially emotional, rather than rational. Élites sense this and operate in the interstices of reason, in the back alleys of the normative jungle, to establish their truth as the truth.
Most people do not demand cognitive coherence in cosmology. It is difficult for anyone in a complex society to understand or hold in their minds an entire ideology as presented by élites. Because any ruling ideology comes to the common man piecemeal, it is difficult to perceive its deficiencies. Hence, when confronted with contradictions in the system most people are willing to let them slide and go on with their lives. This is all the more true when the ruling élite is urging them not to tarry over system imperfections. Using icons and sacred symbols is a way of glossing over system deficits.
And élites wrap themselves in a symbolic cloak of authority and attempt to project their perspective on society. They strive to use instruments of communication, organizations and ideologies to maintain sociocultural formations that serve their interests. Coherence is always in the process of being worked out, or negotiated, because in society at large, there are many local perspectives, many competing particularisms. As élites attempt to foster a more unifying hegemony, they sometimes face a bewildering patchwork quilt of ideas and beliefs. The imposition of a universal ideology on society requires effort and organization. It is the work of hegemons.
Élite office-holders in ancient times were social agents who installed and defended institutions and who organized coherence in projecting their ideology, establishing their point of view as prominently as possible against competing points of view. This was not an easy task. Leaders who wished to establish a ruling ideology/hegemony faced a problem i.e., most of the masses follow common sense based on local knowledge, tradition and the wisdom of the community. This was certainly true in ancient times and remains so in the small town in which I live in Northern California. It is easier to see the trees in front of you, than to perceive the entire forest. The job of hegemons was (and is) to explain the nature of reality as they defined it. That people tend to develop local ideas that may conflict with larger ideas forced the privileged to devise clever and ingenious ways of broadcasting their hegemonic messages to the masses. This was true in the first Neolithic communities and becomes more apparent in complex state systems, but it has occurred in every society since the Neolithic Revolution.

The Role of Scribes and Scriptwriters

In oral societies, shamans and storytellers created myths, legends and proverbs that were passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation. After the Neolithic Revolution aggrandizing leaders began to bring the ideas contained in oral histories together for their own purposes, reworking them in the process. Specialists were attached to chiefly courts to tell and re-tell of the importance of the chief, the chiefly family, their exploits and their heritage.
When writing was devised scribes partially took over this function. Both storytellers and scribes can be seen as scriptwriters, those specialists who fabricate hegemony, or try to, for the ruling élite. In many cases, both early on and later in history, these scriptwriters were shamans or clerics. The politically powerful have always tried to attach themselves to cosmic power, in one fashion or another and storytellers and scriptwriters were convenient ways of establishing and maintaining that connection. It was always seen as helpful if Deity could be seen as the author of hegemony rather than mere human beings.
For example, in the eleventh century in Europe a crisis arose between the church and state and scriptwriters played a large role in defining who was in charge of what. At that time the Papal Revolution provided the first concrete organizational materialization of the Augustinian agenda. Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) started a reform in the church that permeated all of medieval society, changing the way people thought about the social order. Faced with the rising power of states, he set his scribes to work to institutionalize the idea of the separation of church and state, with public responsibilities being divided between them as dual public juridical bodies.
Broadcasters of medieval scholasticism portrayed the church as a hierarchical, juridical corporation holding public legal jurisdiction with a limited area of social life i.e., on church property and in matters spiritual. The state was said to hold temporal jurisdiction, ruling on matters of civil justice, although the church was conceived of as a higher power even if kings and landlord princes were operating more directly in the temporal sphere.
In effect, medieval writers created a formulation that gave secular rulers the right to rule without being divine monarchs, as long as they recognized the importance and supremacy of the Roman Church. In this process of defining spiritual and secular authority, a literate legal science was forming. As it did, the theory of society changed drastically.
Prior to this revolution, for example during the time of Charlemagne, government was equivalent to the church and society, all being part of one organic whole called ecclesia, the Corpus Christi. The Papal Revolution transformed this organic monism into a spiritual body made up primarily, though not exclusively, of clergy; and the state with a worldly prince at the head. The natural and spiritual were slowly being separated in the minds of medieval thinkers. A body politic linked in important ways, to be sure, to the “Body of Christ” was a new dualistic way of thinking. The universal church would rule only spiritually over secular nations, which were members of its holy supervision, the social order of Christendom.
Throughout society there were also other corporations arranged in a hierarchical order of jurisdictions: franchised towns, gilds, manors, the bourgeoisie and special interest groups. They each had their own scriptwriters. Many of the major corporations developed specialized laws that pertained to the unique activities in their realms. From this time on, definite bodies of jural rights and duties were held by all kinds of groups in society.
Scribes captured these legal codifications as they came about at a time when the scribal culture, scholasticism and legal education were emerging as a force in medieval society. Writing enabled their legal roots to be firmly established. Literate clerks and jurists were the codifiers and catalyzers of this progress.
From early oral legends of the Neolithic to emails in the computer system of the White House, aggrandizing office-holders have attempted to fiddle the information of the script, to present a picture to the world that is altered or doctored. Such information control is part and parcel of the platform of power.

What has Increased or Decreased with Time?

Since the end of the Paleolithic, there have been evolutionary changes that have led to certain stages in leadership. We can format this as follows:

Headman
 Village
Chief  Regional
Chief  King  President or
Prime Minister
Family group Village Chiefdom Kingdom Nation-state

We can ask what has increased and/or decreased as we move from stage to stage. We can format this as follows:
 
Headman
 Village
Chief  Regional
Chief  King  President or
Prime Minister
Family group Village Chiefdom Kingdom Nation-state
Increasing poleconomic control/decreasing self reliance 
Increasing scripting (mystification)/decreasing understanding of the whole 
Increasing knowledge base/decreasing understanding of whole 
Increasing opacity of office/decreasing transparency 
Increasing inequality/decreasing egalitarianism 
Increasing distance from decision-makers/
decreasing ability to communicate with decision-makers 
Increasing group control of individual/decreasing self control 
Increasing claims on truth by factions/
decreasing ability to discern which claims on truth are valid 
Increasing possibility of the self-inflicted end of Humankind through
environmental degradation or nuclear war/
decreasing capacity of the individual to stop this 

In sum, as we move beyond storaging hunter-gatherer societies into the peoples that had learned to domesticate plants and animals in the Neolithic, producing a storable, stealable surplus, we see the rise of aggressive managers and their deputies who seriously began to fabricate rules, constructed institutions and proclaimed doctrines with the intent of dominating the people and gaining control of prestige, power and property. In the Jural Revolution, information control became crucial to the new oppressors. Manipulation of information and the creation of a mystique surrounding office were techniques to create a passive society, one that would follow the aggrandizers constructing and materializing the new edifice of power. That societies in history were not always passive, shows how hard it was for hegemons to maintain a single, unified order of things.
 
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