Domination: Chapter 3

3. REDISTRIBUTIVE SOCIETIES – THE BEGINNING OF AGGRANDIZEMENT

Acephalous Societies
As I have said, aggrandizers are born in every society in every epoch. Some are born into a cultural habitus (milieu) that is conducive to their acquisitive nature – the need to control others and desirable material goods. Others were not and their aggrandizing tendencies butted up against the existing ethos of egalitarianism. In early Neolithic acephalous farming or pastoralist communities the surplus was limited and mainly maintained, if at all, to protect against bad years. Self-interested pursuits had to have been carefully planned and to have mainly revolved, initially, around the search of prestige alone or property that was amassed by the prestige-seeker and given back to augment his prestige. In so doing, he strove to be the quintessential big man.
At that time, political leadership was minimal and embedded in kinship and religious structures for the most part, with perhaps some nascent sodalities. Institutions evolved out of the human tendency to value the past over the present, to imbue institutions with greater value as time passes. As headmen formulated codes and techniques of keeping the peace, controlling people’s labor and protecting their meager surplus – granaries and/or herds – they tried to link institutions of governance to the past or to something timeless like the ancestors or Deity. In time, such innovations could become time-honored institutions.
The Neolithic Revolution didn’t start out with a bang. Food was scarce at first and control was minimal, staying more or less at the level of family. There, the headman ruled, controlling food distribution and labor allocation, but strong chiefs had not yet emerged to rule over all the family groups. The job of the headman was to redistribute the food within the family group so that no one got more than anyone else and that the group would survive.
This redistributive function was based on altruistic moral values – the good of the family over and against any one individual. Nevertheless, in this ethos was the seed of exploitation, domination and the emergence of highly non-egalitarian societies to follow. Professor Boehm (1999) makes the point about big men that they struggled to be “hypergenerous” and in so doing they lost much of their humility. The headman of a lineage was supposed to be fair and generous, but in playing his role he did acquire a modicum of privilege. This was just the beginning.
In a way, the value of generosity did not go away after the Agricultural Revolution but rather we see that men began competing to be generous, folding egalitarianism with their private pursuit of prestige. In this process, beneficence became a political tool, a mask for the desire for power and (later) wealth. In fact, what happened in big man societies and titular chiefdoms – classic redistributive societies – was that aggrandizers had to be subtle and shrewd in their political dealings, always appearing to be altruistic, while at the same time pursuing their own interests.
What is redistribution? It is accomplished when someone secures material goods and hands them out to others. This took place in the Paleolithic but was different because material goods were free in nature. Schematically Paleolithic reciprocity looked like this:

Gatherer/hunter’s goods > Receivers in band

That is, if a hunter killed game or a band member found food in the bush; it was brought back to camp and parceled out to band members. This was repeated everyday with no storage involved and a different person each time might do the redistributing. No one had the permanent status of redistributor or was aspiring to be such.
Once there was a surplus, redistributors or managers arose to handle such goods. Schematically Neolithic reciprocity looks like this:

Producer/gatherer’s goods > Redistributor > Receivers

Once managers began to control the surplus they went after other rare and critical resources e.g., water, metals, prestige trade items, weapons production, etc. This gave them the financing to construct and maintain a political power base.
Early redistribution was based on the morality of sharing, with the redistributor not keeping any more of the goods than any other receiver. He did not siphon off much material wealth. The redistributor merely garnered prestige from the transaction. This is often called the classic big man pattern.
As more food allowed larger populations, distribution was limited to family groups, little corporations, if you will. Now it looked something like this:

Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers
Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers
Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers Producer >
Goods >
Redistributor >
Receivers

More often than not, these little corporations were families, wherein food and other vital goods were shared. As populations grew, distribution beyond this small family corporation became symbolic e.g., small bits of food being shared by a larger clan at a sacrifice or feast, for example.
As time passed and as society became more complex other kinds of corporate groups emerged, which can be thought of as sharing groups, with the redistribution cycle staying with the group. Society now looked something like this:

Family group Cult Secret society
Special interest
association Family group Family group
Secret society Family group Special interest
sodality

Each of these formed a circle of redistribution with the group head managing the process. But now we have different kinds of managers, something like this:

Head of family Cult leader Secret society
headman
Special interest
association leader Head of family Head of family
Secret society
headman Head of family Special interest
sodality leader

Prestige, power and property were bundled in each group. Each headman had his own sphere of influence, his own poleconomic domain, as it were. Of course, now we had, on a miniature scale, perhaps within a given village, the potential for conflict over prestige, power and property. There would be some need for rules to handle this conflict and a manager or cadre of managers to enforce the rules.
This is where we observe the need for an overall manager. For example, if in a settlement you now had several family heads, a couple of cult leaders, two headmen of secret societies and two more leaders of special interest associations, someone could arise to mediate between the different interests of each leader. The result would look like this:

Overall Manager
Head of
family Cult
Leader Secret society
headman
Special interest
sodality leader Head of family Head of family
Secret society
headman Head of family Special interest sodality
leader

At first such overall managers were of the genre we might call big men/little chiefs. Exactly what label we put on them is less important than what they did. These men functioned as redistributors of goods and services and mediated between the various groups in society. Their formal power (authority) was limited. They ruled weakly based on their prestige, which was to some extent greater than that of the other leaders, a primus inter pares. In so doing they had more power and their prestige was reinforced and perhaps enhanced, but they did not have significantly more property.
This system was still communalistic and based on reciprocity and sharing of wealth, but prestige was being bundled in leadership. If any siphoning was going on it was limited to two of the three desirables – prestige and power. Property was still held and distributed more or less equitably. But the move had been from acephaly to cephaly i.e., from a society with no overall manager to one with a nascent office-holder – the big man-redistributor. Significantly, whether the big man siphoned any wealth off that surplus which passed through his hands, he was in a position to do so. The stage was set for aggrandizers to take material advantage of the emerging system.

Big Men/Little Chiefs
You can see the potential in a “benign” redistribution system. So could opportunists. Little by little, but finding justifications for it, the big man/little chief could begin to skim off the surplus passing through his hands. This might be justified by the fact that he could no longer farm because of his “duties” as manager and, therefore, society should support him. Whatever the local situation, aggrandizers could find reasons to begin to live off the labor of others. Schematically, instead of this:

Overall Manager
Head of family Head of family Head of family ▲
power
▲
prestige

Special interest association leader Special interest association leader Special interest association leader
Secret society headman Secret society headman Secret society headman


We now have this:

Overall Manager
Head of family Head of family Head of family ▲
property
▲
prestige
▲
power

Special interest association leader Special interest association leader Special interest association leader
Secret society headman Secret society headman Secret society headman

The big man/little chief began to acquire “office” i.e., responsibilities and rights. Clastres (1989) sees titular chiefs as special-event chiefs. Certain events e.g., feasts, ceremonies, building projects, war, called for managers. In time, these special events became institutionalized and it was routine for managers to control things. This was the basis of the Jural Revolution. Furthermore, such a jural bundle of rights and duties became, in time, with lots of manufacturing and fabrication of “rules" on the part of opportunists, hereditary. In other words, this bundle was now passed through the generations from office-holder to office-holder by some devised principle of succession e.g., from father to eldest son; or, through the mother’s line, from mother’s brother to sister’s son.
This is how and why exploitation became a possibility in the Neolithic Revolution. Once there was a surplus to manage, managers had their fingers in the till. They handled the wealth, but what they did with it changed over time. Perhaps the progression looked something like this:


Help society >>>
Help society & my faction(s)
& myself >>>>>> Help myself,
my faction(s)
& society



We have lots of ethnographic studies of big men, which give us a look into what those early redistributive society must have been like. Societies with such incipient leaders exhibit an overall pattern. Ethnographers have found that a big man is the most influential man in his group. His power does not come from an authority-based office, but he receives recognition as a leader by virtue of his skill, ability to acquire material possession and then redistribute those possessions at feasts. He has only influence, not coercive authority and his position in society is unstable. He likely has other big men who are his rivals. Competition, which was minimal in the Paleolithic, became rife when Neolithic redistributive societies emerged.
Nevertheless, this was the beginning of commensal politics i.e., the use of food to create social relationships beyond the family. In the Neolithic feasting became a part of the political economy. We find lots of ethnographic and archaeological evidence that feasting was widespread and ritualized; though some theorists point out that feasting can occur as part of ritual or more secularly as part of the political economy. Both kinds of feasting involve the creation of obligations between hosts and guests and power/dependence relations.
As a strategy to acquire power and prestige, feasting creates an interplay between food and politics wherein food is used to cement power/dependence relations and create obligations. Ethnographically, such feasts may or may not involve wealth accumulation and it is likely that early forms in the Neolithic were mainly about big men simply staying big or getting bigger in prestige terms, or being knocked out by another aggrandizer on the rise.
The power acquired was used to assemble food to give communal feasts, which gave them the power to repeat this cycle and compete with other big men. As Phillips and Sebastian point out for the Amerindians of the Southwest, big men organized feasts to resolve power ambiguities in highly unstable political systems.
The Melanesian big man system of the present-day consists of segmented lineages, locally held together by big men who compete for power in the social structure, which is made up of more or less equal factions that are horizontally arranged. The system is held together as big men compete with each other in an ongoing process of distributing and redistributing material and political resources. The big man has two audiences: his larger group and his faction. He has to keep both happy with food distribution and spreading the word of his “bigness,” thereby maintaining his leadership.
Based on reciprocity, give and take, the competition between big men results in a flattening of resources as big men can only attain prestige by giving them away, not by hoarding them indefinitely. This is temporary siphoning, not exploitative draining of labor value from producers on a permanent basis.
Melanesian big men command people’s labor, resources and affiliation through their powers of persuasion and personal forcefulness. For example, the Kapauku Papuans have been described as individualistic, wealth-oriented people who accorded their highest kudos and fidelity to self-made big men who gave their wealth away in flamboyant displays of generosity.
Marshall Sahlins characterized Melanesian big men as free-enterprising individuals who combine, with a professed interest in the general welfare, a greater measure of self-interested cunning and economic calculation. A crucial aspect of the aggrandizer’s success is his ability to put together a network of exchange partners and followers who are indebted to him through his numerous acts of generosity. Their collecting activities are oriented toward garnering renown.
These are essentially egalitarian societies that have a system of redistribution that allows aggrandizers the opportunity to be individualistic, but not exploitative. The Melanesian big man is a coordinator, not a commander. He achieves influence in return for helping others achieve a range of social, political and religious ends.
Overall disruption of society at large is prevented by the fact that one big man’s activities may cancel out those of another. Reciprocity and redistribution act to level out status and wealth in Melanesia.
Egalitarian sharing in the Paleolithic and in kin systems was a model for big men and little chiefs (a.k.a. titular chiefs), who, to be big, had to be the most generous men in society. We have already encountered little chiefs in the Yokut-Mono Amerindians of California (chapter 2). Little chiefs are distinguished from formal chiefs that emerge later in the evolutionary sequence and who had formalized power or authority. Titular chiefs ruled by force of their personality, having little authority and their “offices” may not have been hereditary in the beginning. Also, the Yokut-Mono little chiefs linked themselves to shamans (winatums), whose purported supernatural powers gave the little chief some mystical “punch.”
Big man societies of today are peoples who now live thousands of years after the development of domestication, so we can assume that earlier egalitarian societies had similar systems of reciprocity. Societies that had a strong principle of reciprocity as a driving force in their worldview would not have needed many formal codifications or legal procedures. Political power could have been diffuse, as reciprocity allowed persons to build up prestige through giving and hence to acquire influential un-codified power in the community.
The politics of reciprocity, therefore, acted to constrain or supplement other forms of political power. Chiefs often coexisted with big men and sometimes the line between them was obscure. Which of these types of politicians became dominant often had to do with the availability of a surplus. Where the surplus was huge, as among the Northwest Coast Amerindians, chiefs acted as big men holding lavish give-away feasts.
More recently, anthropologists have noted that redistributive societies like those governed by big men or titular chiefs change when they come into contact with the capitalist market. Some have said that this is because of the advent of money, but studies like that done by Charles Piot among the Kabre of Togo indicate that money is not the factor. The Kabre who get money in the modern economy, he found, often plow it back into traditional forms of behavior e.g., making sacrifices to the ancestors. Rather, it is opportunity that changes the structure of society, as I tried to show in Continuity and Change in a West African Society. Once young people and women get economic opportunities through contact with the marketplace, they can turn their backs on the gerontocrats and the principles and practices of the ancestor cult and lineage mode of production that they have guarded through time. Economic opportunity undermines previous poleconomic forms.
In a big man system despotism – though sometimes attempted – was held in check by certain leveling mechanisms e.g., gossip, the need or right to contribute to public feasts, fear of witchcraft or the accusation of being a witch. Aggrandizers had to be careful not to overstep ethical lines, which were vague to be sure, but known in a general sense. Wise men knew the boundaries well; fools blundered over them.
In redistributive societies, more formal statuses/roles developed than existed in the Paleolithic. This gave go-getters a political base from which to control the distribution of food. All members of society were producers and consumers, but titular chiefs or big men collected and redirected the products of their labor. Essentially, titular chiefs received and redistributed the goods back to the producers/consumers.
Thus, an incipient political economy had formed which could be used as a basis to control the flow of food and information; but the titular chiefs or big men who operated in the redistributive structures only derived prestige and influence from their role in channeling that food and information. They had not yet apprehended the possibilities of skimming wealth out of the flow for themselves, or if they did see such possibilities, they had not yet been able to alter the structure of the redistributive mechanisms to the point where such extraction was possible.
Nonetheless, this was the institutional base upon which exploitative, appropriational and extractive processes developed. The development of exploitation took time, with different generations of office-holders slightly changing the rules to permit greater extraction of value for their own particular self-interests. In areas with a small surplus, societies got locked into big man systems. Where the surplus was great, chiefdoms and kingdoms came to the fore.

Little Chiefs among the Yokut-Mono of California

Let's look more deeply into a case of how little chiefs operated. Robert Lowie (1948) identified two types of chiefs, titular (temporary leadership) and authoritative (hereditary leadership). The titular chief was a peacemaker who drew his power from public opinion – from the force of the group. In no way could he elevate himself above others, but had to be generous to a fault. Rather than authority, his power rested on his oratory, his ability to persuade by reminding his followers of the group's communalistic mores.
Even in the dirty dealing I am about to describe among the titular chiefs of the Yokut-Mono, they cannot be considered to be at the "big" end of the power continuum, what Lowie called hereditary chiefs. The Yokut-Mono case shows that maneuvering and strategizing by aggrandizing office-holders began way back, in the earliest times; even though titular chiefs had more societal pressure on them to conform to a set of altruistic rules than we might encounter in societies with hereditary chiefs. And they lacked full authority to blatantly circumvent principles of communalism and sharing. However, as the ethnography below will show, that didn't stop them. They went ahead anyway with behaviors that were considered self-enhancing and even evil, in some cases.
The pre-contact Yokut-Mono culture existed in an environment where food collecting and hunting was relatively easy, their California climate being mild. They were not greatly stressed by their environment, which produced a small surplus for them; nor did they develop the great surpluses we see along the northwest coast, with their great runs of salmon and steelhead. The simple nature of these foragers can be seen in this quote from Gayton:
the political institutions of Yokuts and Western Mono were perhaps as simple as any in California. Clans were lacking. The moiety, where it existed, regulated marriage ceremonial participation. Patrilineal families dwelt together in permanent villages but owned no land other than an ill-defined tribal area. The household group was not large; normally its personnel included a married couple, their immature offspring, and a possible orphaned sister of either spouse, or an aged relative. A husband and father was head of his own household affairs but bowed to the opinion of elder male relatives when the entire lineage was involved. These families were entirely free to go about their daily pursuits of hunting, fishing, seed gathering, basket, pottery, and tool making, seeking of supernatural experience, gambling, or idling, without interference from officials. There were none to interfere. The sense of right and wrong, of duty to one's relatives and neighbors, was instilled in children as they grew up. Truthfulness, industry, a modest opinion of oneself, and above all, generosity, were regarded not so much as positive virtues as essential qualities. Informants today condemn those who are greedy, jealous, or egotistical. It was largely upon the personal character of individuals that the peace of a community depended (1930:408).

Gayton presents detailed myths showing an ideology of chiefship. The chief was thought to be helped by the eagle, which was his familiar spirit and that of his descent group. He was always chosen from the eagle lineage or moiety. In a primordial conference of animals, the eagle was established as the leader, as the tiya (little chief) was the surrogate eagle among men, the leader of a Yokut-Mono community. Because of this mythology, the lineages of chiefs and shamans were “mildly aristocratic."
There were no big chiefs or elaborate hierarchical structures of privilege. Little chiefs, tiyas (sing. tiya) had to maneuver in not very well defined offices in order to pursue their particularistic interests without drawing too much attention from the community they were supposed to serve. Gayton outlines the political structure, limited as it was:
Legal authority over the people at large was wielded by chiefs and their henchmen, the winatums (shaman-bailiffs). The chief's power was expressed as a general jurisdiction having a paternal-judiciary aspect. He made decisions on village or tribal affairs such as holding fandangos (dances), or building a new sweat-house, he settled interfamily disputes, and granted permission for death punishments. His judgment operated in place of fixed laws. The winatums were the coordinating element in the interrelationship of the people and their chiefs: they were the universal joint in the social machinery. Their official activities were many, as executing orders from the chief, making announcements, carrying private and public messages between individuals and tribes, directing camp organization, and managing all phases of ceremonial activity. The presence or absence of the minor officials; subchiefs, and dance managers, made little difference in the powers of chiefs or the freedom of citizens . In other words, the chiefs, with their winatums as manipulating instruments, constituted the sole legal authority in the political system of south central California (my inserts, 1930:408).

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

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

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

Little chiefs had a little bit more property than most, being able to siphon somewhat more than pure big men. Gayton goes on to say that the chief was more likely than other men to have multiple wives, a situation thought appropriate because the chief always had to have food prepared in his house to serve to unexpected guests, thus multiple wives were seen as beneficial. The chief had power and some wealth, but people could drop by and eat at his expense, a form of redistribution.
Sometimes the chief would arrange to have the traders stay at his place and sell from there. In this case, he would dispatch his winatums to call the people to come. In this way, the tiya made himself the center of trade and created an opportunity for extracting some value from trading transactions:
In monetary wealth the chief always surpassed his fellow-citizens. The manner in which his worldly goods were acquired is not completely clear but there are several known sources. One of these was through commercial trading of desirable objects such as eagle down, and of articles traded with trans-Sierra Mono, or between local tribes. The commerce in eagle down was controlled by the chief as the bird was sacred to him and could not be killed without his permission (1930:374).

Yokut-Mono chiefs were slightly wealthier than others based on this fabricated and mythologized monopoly in eagle down. Gayton certainly paints a picture of aggrandizing chiefs operating behind paper-thin walls of the machinery of a fragile office. Since chiefs were always from the eagle lineage, which was no wealthier than other lineages, the level of amassable wealth must have been so low as to prevent the rise of spectacularly wealthy descent groups. Wealth alone is not what provided prestige in the Yakut-Mono world.
The chief's house was perhaps larger than that of others but not necessarily or markedly so. Neither was the dress of a chief or of the members of his lineage distinctive. Stephen Powers (1877) stated that Yokut-Mono chiefs wore their hair long, but so did all men. The food storehouses of the chief were always well filled. He did not hunt himself since young hunters in the village provided food for the chief’s family. Such men were not permanently appointed for the task, but would be dispatched by the winatums (shaman-bailiffs) to get fresh meat or fish for the chief from time to time.
Informants disagree as to whether the chief paid for his provisions or not, but the weight of evidence indicates that he did not. The chief had to have a plentiful food supply for it was his duty to offer a meal to every traveler, foreign messenger or stranger who entered his village. Furthermore, the chief or his wives gave meat to extremely poor people or those who had difficulty in obtaining sufficient food, as the aged or widowed, again based on the principle of communalism and reciprocity. Such people would accept the food and if possible would return a little acorn meal to the chief when they had an extra supply. A basket might be given in return, as thanks. Such a return was prompted by courtesy and gratitude and was not compulsory by rule, but was part and parcel of the system of reciprocity and communitarianism.
Unlike some little chiefs in history, the Yokut-Mono had a loose hereditary system. Gayton says:
As a citizen in the community the chief possessed social prestige based primarily on his revered totem and authoritative office, and secondarily upon the wealth that accrued to him because of his position. His position was acquired by heredity. Normally the office passed from an elder brother to the next younger, and then reverted to the elder brother's eldest son. This rule was not rigid, however, and was modified in accordance with circumstance. When a chief became too enfeebled with sickness or age to continue his duties he would say whom he wanted to take his place. If his choice was acceptable to the other chiefs and elder men of the village, a gift of money was sent to the nominee. The man chosen did not have to accept the office unless he wished to (1930:371-372).

Though as we shall see, some little chiefs were “big criminals,” as chiefs they still heard and ruled on petty disputes and quarrels between individuals and families and problems resulting in murder or serious personal injury were usually brought to the chief's attention for settlement.
Even with their scheming, monopolies and accumulating activities, Gayton notes that there was no wealthy class. He attributes this to the leveling function of such rites as the annual mourning ceremony at which a great deal of property was destroyed and more distributed among those present. This ritualized feast dispossessed a bereaved family of any surplus wealth it might have accumulated. The casting away of gifts at mourning ceremonies had the further advantage of keeping money and coveted objects in circulation.
Gayton, in his study of Yokut-Mono titular chiefs and shamans, showed that both used their positions for personal enhancement and that some collaborated to kill people and take their wealth, which was a covert source of income for these aggrandizers. Shamans, in their unofficial capacities, and little chiefs in their formal roles, would at times conspire to rob and murder, as well as commit a number of lesser misdemeanors. This seems extreme and dramatic fare for quiet foragers in ancient California who were not known as a warlike people. Yet, every society has its aggrandizers.
Clearly, even in this early storaging society, the little chief was receiving support from his community, although he also had responsibilities. Chiefs had various strategies open to them; one was just being chiefly, which attracted wealth:
Further profit came to the chief through intertribal commerce. Traders who came from other tribes with baskets, pottery, salt, tanned skins, etc., would first go to the chief's house to state their business, as was customary with all outsiders, and to receive the welcoming meal. Hence the chief had first chance to buy the wares they brought and retail them to his neighbors if he so wished. As a man of wealth he could take advantage of this opportunity to purchase desirable articles (Gayton 1930:401).
.

Obviously, chiefship had its privileges. Additionally, Yokut-Mono chiefs also took bribes to allow someone to be killed, even within their own Eagle Lineage. The killer would approach the chief, tell him of his intended victim, reach an agreement as to the payment, and, with the blessing of the newly enriched chief, proceed with his crime. Here we see a classic example, if an extreme one, of a public servant using his office as a shield for antisocial behavior because that behavior enriches him.
But there were more outlays for the chief. Gayton indicates that a chief always had to pay a little more for entertainers, ceremonial performers or specialists, as it was expected that a chief should pay more; but, on the other hand, chiefs made profits when ceremonies were held. It was said that the chief "gave a dance" or "made a ceremony," but that was symbolic. It was in the give-and-take that his position was ratified. It was the flow of wealth through the hands of the chief that counted. Or rather the appearance of flow. While the chief was supposed to be spending more than others, in reality it was the public at large who financed big ceremonies. No public levies were placed on the public in advance but each person at the ceremony was expected to pay. It was a siphoning situation for the chief.
Because of their control of trade and ceremonies as well as their hidden criminal activities, Yokut-Mono titular chiefs were on the brink of making a profit. This was the generally accepted picture of the chief, but a chief who was not a good man at heart, and who had a desire for too much personal aggrandizement, was thought to have attained it through illegitimate arrangements with malevolent shamans. Chiefs’ selfishness had to be kept hidden, behind the shield of office.
Thus, one avaricious strategy open to chiefs was amoral collusion with occult entrepreneurs (winatums). The fear of aggrandizement by officials and attached shaman-bailiffs, and the recorded cases of both chiefs and shamans being put to death, indicate that office-holders and their henchmen did, from time to time, abuse their offices and their imaginary powers.
However, if the aggrandizers had stratagems, so did the community. Given the fact that little chiefs did not control any physical means of coercion, and shamans only had their "imagined powers," it was a simple, direct and straightforward strategy: if a man knew positively that a shaman or chief had killed a member of his family he could take it upon himself to kill the evildoer. He would just get his bow and go out and hide until he had a chance to shoot the man.
Unlike more technologically advanced chiefdoms, where the chiefs had access to superior weapons, guards or warriors and where they lived in fortified houses or palaces, the Yokut-Mono were not unlike peoples in the Paleolithic, where everyone had the same weapons. The Yakut-Mono chief lived in a simple, if slightly bigger, house and had to walk around unguarded like everyone else in Yakut-Mono society. This acted as a leveler. For instance, it would have been very hard to kill an Egyptian Pharaoh, with his enclosed residence and bodyguards, but the Yokut-Mono people had daily access to both chiefs and shamans and could settle a dispute violently.

 
Shamans among the Yokut-Mono of California

A system of beliefs existed in Yokut-Mono society that divided the cosmos into the mundane world and a supernatural realm. Anyone with special powers to communicate with the occult world was considered a shaman or winatum.
While the overall ethic of post-Paleolithic foraging societies was still largely egalitarian and democratic, in time some developed ideas about the supernatural that formed the basis of informal statuses that could develop into powerful means of pursuing vested interests for some men once there was a surplus over which to compete. Among the storaging Yokut-Mono, such ideas revolved around curing and sorcery, the work of shamans. These go-getters were said to have more dream experiences than the average person, which was thought to be an indicator of intense contact with the hidden world of spirits.
To seek assistance from supernatural powers for success in gambling, hunting, or general good health and fortune was anyone's privilege. Most Yokut-Mono seemed to rely on their innate abilities, not pursuing the supernatural on their own. Enterprising men did, however. They worked to become shamans so that, in their belief system, supernatural powers would aid them to accomplish more and get more than their neighbors.
While the path to chiefship was defined genealogically, the tiya always coming from the Eagle Lineage, the road to wealth and power for the winatum was more open-ended, easier to access for the common aggrandizer. Gayton explains:
Shaman's power was not of a peculiar sort nor was it inherited. It was merely a greater quantity, an accumulation of dream experiences, say six, to an average person's one or two. The more of such experiences one had the greater his knowledge of the occult would become, and the bond between the individual and the supernatural world increasingly strengthened. In other words, the difference between a shaman's power and that of a non-professional was one of quantity rather than of quality. As one informant expressed it: "A doctor was just a person who had too much power. They got mean, tried to see what they could do just to be doing it, and finally got so they thought they could do anything by means of their power. People would be here yet if the doctors weren't so mean" (1930:389).

Yokut-Mono shamans had two power bases: their close association with chiefs and their occult base. Mystically, they used or created imaginary powers that connected them in the minds of the people more closely with the occult. This connection came in the form of recurrent dreams and the shaman was more frequently able than the average person to access an animal-familiar for secret information, or that was the theory.
Thus, like shamans everywhere, they fostered the hypothesis that secret avenues to extraordinary information existed and that they had a special channel to that information, which gave them power over others. Gayton says that their success was largely due to what was doubtless make-believe powers does not matter; they played an awe-inspiring, dominating role whatever its basis. Furthermore, this was a dangerous path, as shamans who were thought to have become too aggressive were put to death. But that did not deter the strong-minded. The acquisition of wealth and power was worth taking a risk, even though both were minimal in Yakut-Mono society. These were ambitious men in a quiet society, men with the talents needed for the fulfillment of their ambitions.
The avenue to prestige, power and property can be material, as in getting better weapons or owning the means of production; but it can also be based on immaterial imaginings, as in the case of Yokut-Mono shamans. In the altruistic version of the theory of Yokut-Mono mysticism, shamans were supposed to be capable of curing people of illness and protecting them against the evil intentions of others. In the antisocial version, the occult powers of the sorcerer could be used to sicken or kill people. Shamans who were successful at curing people were revered; those who appeared to be performing their trade in an evil fashion, as evidenced by an inordinate number of dead patients, were themselves killed. Thus, the use of imagined powers had its rewards and its dangers. Gayton wrote that any shaman who continued to cure after losing lots of patients was the one to be feared. The dead were an indication that he was causing illness just to make money in curing, without regard for public welfare. But the doctor whose avidity led him to such extremes could be done away with on slight evidence; so he had but a tenuous hold on life. One of Gayton's informants, who had winatums in his family tree and had known them intimately, described the activities of shamans in the following words:

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

Yokut-Mono Shamans and Little Chiefs

The real power of the shamans came in their alliances with chiefs. By working closely with shamans, through their exercise of imaginary powers, chiefs were able to attain more wealth and power. Gayton wrote that the cozy relationship between chiefs and shamans was a reciprocal back-scratching enterprise. In essence, it was a system that greatly increased the wealth of the chief on the one hand and protected the shaman from the violence of avenging relatives on the other.
Income from murders was divided by the tiya and winatum who had committed the homicide. Should the victim's relatives seek vengeance, for which they had to obtain the chief's permission, the chief then simply refused on the grounds of insufficient evidence. In one case, the chief was report to have told the offended family that the shaman was not at fault because the night had caused the illness, which may have been a reference to the chill of the night air.
In every Yokut-Mono tribe a powerful shaman was the close friend and associate of the chief. They operated jointly to extort money from their constituents. This extractive alliance operated in various ways. For instance, they used non-payment for important ceremonies as an excuse to kill. Theoretically no one was compelled to contribute to the annual mourning ceremony, or any other ceremony, for that matter; but dire results often befell those who did not do so. The chief had to keep the money coming in from the various rites, ceremonies and dances.
Shamans, in addition to their ritualistic duties, also acted as bailiffs or community organizers. This provided the chiefs and shaman-bailiffs opportunities for extortion. Conjoining in a political economy of scare tactics, chiefs and shamans would bully the people into contributing to the various ceremonies arranged and controlled by the chiefs and organized by the shamans.
Anthropologically, this can be viewed as a nascent version of the Extortionist State I will describe for medieval Catalonia in chapter 9. For the Yokut-Mono, the shaman and chief ran a protection racket not unlike that perpetrated by the Count of Barcelona on the Muslim principalities on the Catalan border. In the Yokut-Mono case, tribal citizens were supposed to be protected by the chief, but they were also at risk of him using his office nefariously, especially when he hooked up with wicked shamans. We will see the same kind of misuse of office on the part of the Count of Barcelona who participated in the abuse of the peasants he was sworn to protect (see also: Mendonsa 2008).
The Count of Barcelona was high and mighty, surrounded by armed guards, but in the Yokut-Mono case both chiefs and shamans had to be careful not to incur the wrath of the community, as they could be killed using traditional means: with a bow and arrow, a lance or a knife. In a world with no indoor plumbing, even chiefs and shamans had to go frequently and alone into the bush.
It is understandable that there might be a bad egg or two in the basket. But Gayton's ethnography shows that both chiefs and shamans went against public opinion by engaging in secret dealings, sometimes including multiple chiefs, not just one chief with one shaman. This happened in spite of the fact that both chiefs and shamans were sometimes killed for such behavior. It was imperative then, for the perpetrators of malevolence to keep things under wraps, to operate behind the camouflage of office. Yokut-Mono society was small, a little community of face-to-face foragers. In such a setting, secrets were hard to keep, yet conspirators tried. Gayton says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A chief may be jealous of a rich man in another tribe. If he wants him killed he sends his winatum (shaman-bailiffs) to several other chiefs of near-by tribes, including that of the ill-fated man, asking them to come to a certain place on a certain night. Tawatsanahahi (Baker's Hill) was a favorite spot for these meetings. The various chiefs together with their doctors came at the stated time. There might be ten to fifteen present, including the doctors and the chiefs' trusted winatums.
The chief who called the meeting addresses the group saying that he and perhaps others want to do away with this certain man, and asks those present for their opinion in the matter. The people who want the man killed put up a sum of money to pay the doctors who are to do the killing. If the doomed man's chiefs want him saved they have to double this sum and give it to the opposing chiefs. If they do not do so they automatically sanction the man's death. The case is decided right there at the time. Very often such a man is killed not because he is rich but because "he knows too much" about doings of chiefs, etc., or because some man wants the victim's wife, and has bribed the chief to have the man killed. If the man is to be killed the doctors start right in to do it. "No matter how far off that man may be the doctors will be able to kill him (italics are mine, 1930:399).

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

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

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

Other Yokut-Mono Avenues to Prestige, Power and Property

Another entrepreneurial means to advancement open to a Yokut-Mono commoner-opportunist was to become a Prophet in the Ghost Dance, which was a millenarian movement that came to California by way of traders about 1870. Ghost Dance prophets claimed that the "Father" and a "Host of Dead" were about to return. This did not last long for the reason that the chiefs suppressed the Ghost Dance because the people were spending too much time, and presumably wealth that usually went to chiefs, on Ghost Dance ceremonies. The new phenomenon came as the:

… first news of the cult to reach the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains was brought by traders. No attention was paid to this. A few months later a North Fork apostle visited Western Mono and Yokut tribes of the San Joaquin river to proselytize. This he did by making public speeches, sending winatums about to near-by tribes, and "making" a Ghost Dance at a site in his own territory (1930:416).

By all accounts this chief, and presumably others who initially became involved, saw this new cult as another means of self promotion. The movement spread from north to south encompassing many communities. Whenever the Prophets entered a community, they went to the chief to get permission to hold a dance or ceremony. Chiefs often consulted powerful shamans to get a second opinion, so to speak. Presumably the shamans either saw an opportunity or became apostles and Prophets themselves, because the movement raged for more than a year among the Yokut-Mono.
Eventually, however, the millenarian movement became a social problem. At first chiefs and shamans supported the new ceremonies, but when the movement seemed to be getting out of hand, as it was taking away their traditional supporters and clients, the chiefs interceded to put an end to their competitors. Also when the "Father" and the "Host of Dead" did not materialize, the chiefs saw the cult as a drain on the community's energy and resources and they called a halt to the movement.

Clastres' View of Little Chiefs
Pierre Clastres (1989), a philosopher-anthropologist, one who thought and wrote about chiefs and the emergence of government, indicates that the human animal longs to be free of the oppression of culture, but intuitively understands that that is not possible. Nevertheless, Clastres felt that humans do see some possibility of freedom from coercion. He says if man is a “sick animal” this is because he is not solely a “political animal” and from his anxiety there awakens the great desire that obsesses him. This is the desire to cast aside the restraints of culture and rid himself of his constrained condition in life. In his anti-state rhetoric Clastres is saying that absolute transcendence of the social condition is not possible, but resisting the coercive state is.
Clastres' Society Against the State contains some wisdom and a giant fatal flaw. The latter becomes evident the more you read this interesting book. It is a flaw founded in the ax Clastres has to grind, apparently against the state, which everywhere throughout the book is portrayed as evil. On the other hand, primitive (his term) society is portrayed as, somehow, being collectively against the state. In his view, when the state tries to rear its ugly head, people in pre-state societies recognize governmental evil and suppress it. They seem to automatically want little chiefs and not big chiefs with authority and great power. Clastres only gives a couple of very weak examples of this – those of the Tupi-Guarani Amerindians of South America and the Apache war leader, Geronimo.
The latter is such a weak anecdotal tale, that I will not waste time dealing with it. The case of the Guarani is more interesting, because it actually disproves Clastres’ theory. The author seems to be saying that early man mystically became conscious of society's power over the individual. When that happened, in this “just so” story, Clastres says that institutions emerged to curb that power. Primitive man fears the state, says Clastres and will do everything in his power to resist its emergence. Of course, his idealized Noble Savage must have failed because we got Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztecs and many more exploitative states.
He says of early "simple" peoples:

They had a very early premonition that power's transcendence conceals a mortal risk for the group, that the principle of an authority which is external and the creator of its own legality is a challenge to culture itself. It is the intuition of this threat that determined the death of their political philosophy. For, on discovering the great affinity of power and nature, as the twofold limitation of the domain of culture, Indian societies were able to create a means for neutralizing the virulence of political authority. They chose themselves to be the founders of that authority, but in such a manner as to let power appear only as a negativity that is immediately subdued: they established it in keeping with its essence the negation of culture), but precisely in order to strip it of any real might. Thus, the advent of power, such as it is, presents itself to these societies as the very means for nullifying that power. The same operation that institutes the political sphere forbids it the exercise of its jurisdiction: it is in this manner that culture uses against power the very ruse of nature (1989:44).

Let's look at Clastres' argument in some detail because it is crucial to my contrary position. In short, Clastres says that powerful chiefs or the state cannot emerge out of pre-state societies in a gradual fashion. This is because in some mystical sense society recognizes that this will mean the end of personal freedom. For example, he says:

In the estimation of the tribe, what qualifies such a man to be chief? In the end, it is his "technical" competence alone: his oratorical talent, his expertise as a hunter, his ability to coordinate martial activities, both offensive and defensive. And in no circumstance does the tribe allow the chief to go beyond that technical limit; it never allows a technical superiority to change into a political authority. The chief is there to serve society; it is society as such – the real locus of power – that exercises its authority over the chief. That is why it is impossible for a chief to reverse that relationship for his own ends, to put society in his service, to exercise what is termed power over the tribe: primitive society would never tolerate having a chief transform himself into a despot (1989: 207).

It seems that Clastres has fallen into that trap of believing what the natives would like to believe – their ideal model of social life, as it should be, not as it is. There is much ethnography today to show that societies have an ideal model and real behavior never matches the “should be” ideals.
Clastres seems to speak in absolute terms not in accordance with either the facts he presents, wider ethnography or the more detailed facts of history. For example, he says that it is impossible for a chief to put society in his service, to exercise what is termed power over the tribe. Nevertheless, it has happened frequently in history and most definitely in the Yokut-Mono ethnography I just covered.
According to Clastres’ scheme, the only area of life that seems to escape the all powerful societé primitive is demography or population increase, which of course is standard fair in the study of social change, for example see the fine book by Allen Johnson and Tim Earle (1987), The evolution of human societies: From foraging group to agrarian state. Whereas Johnson & Earle dispassionately show the linkage between increasing population and social change, Clastres says the increase in densities has to unsettle but not destroy primitive society. In fact he says it is very probable that a basic condition for the existence of primitive societies is their relatively small demographic size (for a contrary opinion, see Bruce Trigger 1990).
In La société contre l'État, Clastres claimed that in a "primitive society" there was a mystical fondness to successfully resist the emergence of political authority. Yet, by Clastres’ own account, and that of colonial chroniclers, the Guayaki Indians studied by Clastres had long-established authoritative chieftainships and even federations of chieftainships ruled by provincial kings. Thus Clastres’ own ethnography provides us with a conundrum. How is it that people who naturally resist the emergence of institutions of domination allow them to emerge?
Clastres does admit that from time to time – as mere asides to his thesis – that these "tribes" entered into alliances. But Clastres' interest seems to be in showing that state power is not possible in a primitive society
Of course, this is the opposite of what I contend. I emphasize that in early egalitarian societies men began to fabricate new rules that propelled society, in time, to another level of complexity with a different type of political economy. The embryonic state lies within the first corporations developed.
In his terminology, to Clastres the result of consensus omnium in egalitarian societies, before coercive authority was created, was the rejection of power. In his view, in such societies there is an utter negation of power. I would say that consensus omnium against aggrandizement existed in the egalitarian societies of the Paleolithic, but began to disappear once foragers became storagers.
In the face of his own ethnographic facts, the history of the Tupi-Guarani area and the larger world stage where states have arisen, Clastres programmatically asserts that there is a natural and mystical resistance to domination in "primitive society." I would ask: what are we to make of the fact that this indigenous resistance to domination failed? Not only states, but patriarchy and many forms of domination have evolved out of the egalitarianism of the Paleolithic.
Evidently, the fabrication of domination must have been slow and embedded in the formation of custom, in the incremental laying down of codes early farmers and herdsmen. The people, and even the fabricators themselves, could not see where small code fabrications would lead. Yet, as men invented rules and institutions, they simply did so in ways that permitted later aggrandizers to corrupt those institutions, getting greater and greater access to prestige, power and property as they altered the rules initially laid down.
What is remarkable is that Clastres seems aware of the contradiction between his theorizing and the very facts that he presents to us. He says:

And here it seems that I have just contradicted myself by speaking of the Tupi-Guarani as an example of a primitive society in which something was beginning to surface that could have become the state. It is undeniable that a process was developing in those societies, in progress for quite a long time no doubt – a process that aimed at establishing a chieftainship whose political power was not inconsiderable. Things had even reached a point where the French and Portuguese chroniclers did not hesitate to bestow on the great chiefs of tribal federations the titles "provincial kings" or "kinglets" (1989:43).

In the very people he holds up as the poster child of a society that resisted the state, the Tupi-Guarani, there is evidence that opportunists were forming an official political base from which to operate.

The Emergence of Stratification in Little Chiefdoms

Clastres seems to pine for simplicity and order in Amerindian society while the Yokut-Mono data show men strategizing and scheming on the backstage of office. The Yokut-Mono ethnography demonstrates that even little chiefs used their limited authority for both altruistic and selfish ends, sometimes simultaneously. These data clearly refute Clastres' thesis of benign chiefship among the early Indians of the Americas.
My point is that exploitation began with such "little" or incipient offices as the Yokut-Mono tiya and with the development of informal ideas like shamanism. Even in such a small society, these operators conducted themselves in terms of the political economy as it existed in their world and they were laying the building blocks for later complexity. At a more general theoretical level, one can say that any social or cultural formation has the potential for being used by others in society in coercive ways. Aggrandizers are good at finding the “toolness” of any institution in order to achieve their personalistic ends, usually in pursuit of power, prestige and property.
Domination began to occur in small doses even in very simple societies, early on in history. We can see those “baby steps” toward despotic institutions in Yokut-Mono society, which was a very simple society that professed an egalitarian ethos. This must have happened multiple times throughout the early Neolithic. In time, with the emergence of leadership roles, extractive and authoritarian leadership became codified. The continuum would look something like this:

incipient leaders >>>> little (titular)
chiefs >>>> big
chiefs >>>> kings

All along the continuum, labor was being controlled, but only when we get into titular chiefs do we begin to see the emergence of institutionalized privilege to control it and some wealth accumulation resulting from labor value extraction. In the Melanesian big man societies, for example, labor value is being controlled, but only for purposes of building the prestige of the big man. Power is exercised for reasons of redistributing the products of labor more evenly in society. Control of labor and production remains in the hands of the people, but some of the surplus is tapped to be made available more broadly.
And the incipient and ephemeral control of labor in the very earliest societies, or in the simplest contemporary ones, is qualitatively different from permanent leadership or authority of chiefs, kings, and emperors. What we see happening along the continuum is the development of rules that increasingly allow extra-familial control of labor. This control becomes institutionalized in later stratified social structures e.g., large-scale chiefdoms and kingdoms.
Mainly this happened in history after plants and animals were domesticated, but it also happened in storaging societies e.g., the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast of the Americas, who have become renowned for their complex institutions, such as ceremonial potlatches, slavery, cedar plank-house villages and rich artistic traditions. In these Pacific Northwest storaging tribes, dried fish was their storable, stealable surplus. In time, with gradual changes in the nature of the system, large-scale harvesting, processing and storing activities resulted in increased control over resources and "stimulated a hierarchical organization of power over labor." Chiefs also extended hegemony by sponsoring competitive feasts that drew upon the labor of family members and skimmed interest from others' donations of goods and foods. No doubt these big men knew that when they distributed gifts at feasts they were establishing debt relations that they could later call in as labor.
This proved beneficial for élite families. Northwest Coast chiefs and nobles formed a ruling class that controlled labor. Status was indicated by differences in housing, foods, and privileges between nobles and commoners.
Another example from California is the Chumash storagers. Having had a storable, stealable surplus, they are recognized by anthropologists as complex hunter-gatherers with the following organizational characteristics: ascribed chiefly leadership, a strong maritime economy based on oceangoing canoes, an integrative ceremonial system, and intensive and highly specialized craft production activities. But the Chumash were different from the Northwest Coast Amerindians in that their surplus was only a stimulus to the development of little chiefs and big chiefs came with the building of costly and elaborate ocean-going canoes that only the wealthy could afford to construct. This gave privileged access to sea foods and long-distance trade in prestige items, all controlled by canoe-owning chiefs and élites.
The material world in California and higher up on the Pacific Coast were different. Foragers like the Yokut-Mono, who lived in a land-based environment "lush-enough" to produce a modest surplus, developed little chiefs, and still stressed cooperation in community relations. They had only incipient hierarchy. It appears that the Chumash began in this fashion, but developed sophisticated ocean-going canoes that increased the income of owners, catapulting them into greater complexity and a highly stratified society.
Storagers like the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast, who had access to annual runs of salmon and steelhead, which could be smoked and stored for long periods of time, developed big chiefs, competition and a complex hierarchical social order. We see in comparing the Yakut-Mono with storagers like the later Chumash and the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast a hypothesis: the greater the access to a storable, stealable surplus; the greater the complexity of the society.
In essence, I am saying that once systems had become redistributive, germinal opportunities for exploitation were put in place. When that which is being redistributed became an enormous store, more institutions were created that allowed chiefs and élites to siphon off some of the surplus. This was in an incipient stage in the Yokut-Mono case, but more advanced in the Kwakiutl and late-Chumash, where élites and political factions emerged as it became possible to mobilize and manipulate basic resources and valuables. As with élites later in agricultural societies, Kwakiutl and late-Chumash aristocrats expropriated resources, material and nonmaterial, from the larger population through manipulation of the rule structure of society.

Redistribution and Means of Control

My perspective is that by setting up systems of redistribution, broadcast to the general public as being in their own interest, aggrandizers were able, over time, to draw off value, accumulate it and invest it in three means of control: the means of:
1) Production

2) Destruction (war)

3) Construction

By construction I mean the creation of nontransparent institutions, offices and roles that allowed élites to extract value from producers, while still proclaiming the ethos of communalism, egalitarianism and group solidarity.
The created opaque institutions also can be seen as constituting a means of mystification, a way of influencing the minds of societal members. The power of aggrandizers to exploit non-élites, then, were present in their control of a production-destruction-construction complex, but before those means were openly pursued and held by opportunists, they were pursued covertly by skimming off the flow of goods and services through the hands of big men, titular chiefs and others such as the shamans of Yokut-Mono society. In other words, in redistribution systems men in positions of power who claimed to merely be primus inter pares could foster private aggrandizement.
By allowing redistributors to slowly develop symbols of office and power, followers were slowly lulled into accepting subjugation, its fabrication appearing to be benign in its imperceptible gradualness and redundancy. Either by being elevated to the pedestal, or by climbing up there, a long series of aggrandizing office-holders spun the ideological fabric of coercive power in which future chiefs could wrap themselves.


A Cybernetic Perspective

Domination is about control. Clearly, beginning roughly twelve thousand years ago, aggrandizers began the process of formulating rules to allow more and more control of the means of production and destruction. Looked at another way, this entailed the control of information. By encoding certain strategic bits of information in unquestionable forms e.g., legends, proverbs, sacrificial customs, annual ceremonies, etc., opportunists were able to slowly formulate the institutional outlines of a hierarchical society.
Once redistributive structures were created – headmanships of lineages, big man systems, titular chiefs – some encodements began to restrict the flow of information through the auspices of the redistributors. At this early stage, with big men and little chiefs, information was not blocked to any great extent from the general public, nor was information exclusive enough to allow the exercise of a fully developed political economy. However, with the passage of time, managers were able to fabricate new rules and structures, which can be seen as encodements of information. By doing this, they were able to extract wealth from people and there were many more blockages of information flows. Of course, one especially clever way of blocking the public from key information was to create mystical ideas to support one’s leadership, ideas that could not be checked or easily countered by opponents.
The important information of how to control people and wealth became embedded in sacred texts and carefully constructed codes, a poleconomic treasure for aggrandizers intent on controlling the storable, stealable surplus and on attaining more and more prestige, power and property.
Furthermore, once hierarchical structures were formed, only some members of society had access to this information. Early gerontocracies, for example, kept information from women and younger men. For the Sisala of Africa I have shown that this still exists within the patriarchal structures of ancestor sacrifice and divination. In short, only the most senior men in society can approach their ancestors through divination and only elders can call upon the dead to help with problems within the family group. Since deviance is thought to be punished by the ancestors, divination and piacular sacrifice function as a political economy, permitting senior men to control the behavior of younger men and women. In other words, information about how to solve problems of health and interpersonal conflict is ritually walled off. Subordinate males and all females are not able to access this encoded information except by going through the auspices of the patriarchal structure.
In the early Neolithic leaders emerged to deal with problems, exigencies and opportunities. To accomplish this they controlled information, in other words, they had to be able to influence public opinion. Sisala elders do this today through already institutionalized means – divination and ancestor veneration. But in earlier societies, management was more fluid. Most early chiefs were little chiefs, men of influence rather than officers with authority. An example can be seen in the office of Sheikh of the Rwala Bedouin. Speaking of the Sheikh's duties in external relations Lancaster (1981) says that the sheikh's prime task is mediation and negotiation. He does not operate based on authority, “for there is no legal framework nor coercive force available to him. All the sheikh can do is represent the tribe and bank on knowing what the tribe wants in any particular circumstance. He then has to persuade the tribe to accept the results of his negotiation.”
Thus we see in redistribution systems, titular officials emerged to deal with certain problems or opportunities. They ruled in an ad hoc fashion and by persuasion rather than as authoritative sovereigns. Yet these early managers were able to use redistribution for their own self advancement during their tenure and redistribution systems came to form a basis for later hierarchical systems, to which we now turn.

SOURCES – CHAPTER 3: REDISTRIBUTION

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