The Creation of Political Domination: From the Paleolithic to the Present
by
Eugene L. Mendonsa, Ph.D
All rights reserved
© 2008
Eugene L. Mendonsa
This book is affectionately
dedicated to my son,
Matthew Eugene Mendonsa who will
understand this book.
About the Author
Dr. Eugene L. Mendonsa is an author, painter, filmmaker & a retired anthropologist. He is a graduate of Cambridge University in England. He is the author of a “how to paint” book with Ann Templeton, called Color and Beyond and an academic book entitled: The Scripting of Serfdom in Medieval Catalonia: An Anthropological View.
He has published numerous professional, business and fiction pieces, some of which have won awards. He also wrote and directed the documentary shown on PBS entitled: Sisala Divination: The Mystic Tradition. His books include: The Politics of Divination; Continuity and Change in a West African Society: Globalization's Impact on the Sisala of Ghana; West Africa: An introduction to its history, civilization and contemporary situation; The Scripting of Domination in Medieval Catalonia; Literacy and the Culture of Domination in Medieval Catalonia; and a murder mystery called: Fishing for Clues. His latest fiction book is Portrait of a Dog as a Young Artist and Other Short Stories. His latest nonfiction book is Color and Beyond.
OUTLINE
Introduction
A Note on Poleconomics
The Questions at Issue
Inequality
Scripted Domination
Mystification
Secrecy
Malfeasance in Office
Which is Normal: Cooperation or Competition?
What is Power?
Strategic Man
Civilization & Cynicism
1. The Paleolithic & the Emergence of Complexity
The Long Paleolithic
The End of the Ice Age
The Natufians of the Levant
Why did Foragers begin Farming?
The Need for Storage
The Question of Warfare
The Emergence of Complexity
Heterarchy and Hierarchy
Sources of Inequality
Community vs. Aggrandizement
Primordialism vs. Constructionism
2. Implications of the Neolithic Revolution
Domestication: A Revolution
The Rise of the State in Egypt
The Jural Revolution in the Neolithic
Neolithic Offices and Normative Manipulation
Augmentation of Office in the Neolithic and Beyond
The Rise to Power through Military Service
Scripting Information for Power: The Case of the Early Popes
Mystification & Information Control among the Inka
Mystification in the Sisala Gerontocracy
The Role of Scribes and Scriptwriters
What has Increased or Decreased with Time?
3. Beyond Redistributive Societies – the Beginning of Aggrandizement
Acephalous Societies
Big Men/Little Chiefs
Little Chiefs among the Yokut-Mono of California
Shamans among the Yokut-Mono of California
Yokut-Mono Shamans and Little Chiefs
Other Yokut-Mono Avenues to Power, Prestige and Property
Clastres’ View of Little Chiefs
The Emergence of Stratification in Little Chiefdoms
Redistribution and Means of Control
A Cybernetic Perspective
4. Ownership and Corporate Groups in the Jural Revolution (133-167)
Fabricating “Truth” and the Other
What was Being Fabricated in the Jural Revolution?
Ownership
Corporate Groups and Ownership
Tlingit Storaging and Stratification
Medieval Britain: Communal to Private Ownership
5. Chiefdoms
Why are Chiefdoms Especially Important?
What are Chiefdoms?
Why did Chiefdoms Arise?
Two Strategies to Chiefship
The Germanic Model: Loot and Reciprocity
The Instability of Chiefdoms
Were Chiefs Altruists?
The Fabrication of Chiefly Authority
The Creation of Hereditary Succession
Controlling Land and Labor
Chiefly Insecurity
Chiefly Myths and Using Deity
A Shift in Decision Making
Dismantling Egalitarianism
6. Scottish Highland Chiefs: Fabricating Broken Men and Broken Clans
The Lowlands and the English
Highland Clan Chiefs
Outsider Views of Highlanders
Traditional Hierarchy
Feasting and Feuding
Moving, Joining & Attracting: The Quest for Followers
The Traditional Economy & its Transformation
Commoner Resistance to Change
Contact and its Influence
Attempts at Cultural Genocide
Fabricating Rents from Renders
Broken Clans - Broken Men
Collusion with the Crown
The Infamous Clearances
Conclusions: Lairds to Landlords
7. Kingdoms and Early States
What are Kingdoms?
The Problem with the King’s Death
The Risk of Despotism
Kingly Display
The Materialization of Maya Kingship in Cerros
The Formation of Kuba Kinship
Kuba Economy
Kuba Stratification
Fabrication of Kuba Kingship
The Resulting Kingship Structure & Stratification
Kingship and Access to Wealth
Manufacturing Divine Kingship
Increasing Power & Wealth-Access under Divine Kingship
Abuse of Kingship
8. Manufacturing the State and Serfdom
Early History of Catalonia
Fabricating State Law
Status, Power and Poverty
Society as it Developed in Early Catalonia
The Peasantry
Relations between Estates
The Seigneurie Banale: Fabricating Serfdom by the Sword
Fabricating Serfdom by the Pen
The Emergence of Convenientiae
The Remença War and the Sentencia
9. Fabrication, Imperialism and the Extortionate State in Catalonia
The Rationalization of Rule
Centralization and New Forms of Power
How the Crown used Documents to Dominate
The Legalization of Oppression: Internal Extortion
Oral Custom to Written Law
A Pariah Ideology
External Extortion and the Reconquista
The Extortionist State: The Mediterranean
State Piracy
10. Conclusions
The Questions are Still at Issue
Which History?
The Camouflage of “Democracy”
Government Camouflage & the Military Industrial Complex
Institutional Growth & War
Lies about the Militarization of Space
It’s about Illusion
Commitment in the Modern World
Press Your Government
What We Need To Do
List of Boxes (pages)
Box 1.1. A comparison of Simple and Complex Foragers (???)
Box 1.2. Political Evolution through History (???)
Box 5.1. Traits of Chiefdoms (???)
Box 5.2. Basic Tendencies of the Network & Corporate Modes (???)
Box 5.3 Official Security through Time (???)
Box 6.1 Breadalbane Estate: Summary of Rent –1670 (???)
Box 7.1 Kuba Stratification (???)
Box 8.1. Symbolic Comparison of Nobles & Peasants (???)
Box 8.2. Catalonian Hierarchy (???)
Box 8.3. Evolution of the Catalonian State (???)
Box 8.4. Compensation for Murder & Injury (???)
Box 8.5. Iberian Social Classes in the fourteenth Century
according to Eiximensis (???)
Box 8.6. Increase in Gold use in Catalonia’s Commercial Transactions (???)
Box 8.7 Permanency of Class Relations before,
during & after the Seigneurie (???)
Box 9.1 Genealogies of Counts and Kings (???)
Box 9.2 Kings of Aragón & Catalonia (???)
Box 9.3. Castle-holding Agreements among
the Lay Aristocracy (???)
Box 9.4. Ormerod’s Schema (???)
INTRODUCTION
A Note on Poleconomics
Before we begin let me explain my use of some unique terms dealing with political economy. Poleconomics (sing. poleconomic) is my term for the behavioral combination of the political and economic. I think poleconomy (political economy) better describes the reality of the sources of domination, as those with political power tend to have economic resources beyond the average person; and those with great wealth tend to hold or have excessive access to political power. Yet I will use the more accepted “political economy” throughout this book. Nevertheless, I am trying to get the reader to see that political and economic aggrandizement go hand-in-hand, as we will see in our journey through the history of the last twelve thousand years.
The Questions at Issue
There are six key concepts that I will present in this work:
(1) Domination;
(2) Inequality (stratification);
(3) Scripting (fabrication);
(4) Mystification;
(5) Secrecy;
(6) Malfeasance in office.
Anthropological research has shown that institutionalized domination leading to inequality (or stratification) is pervasive in human societies. Why do a few men dominate other people? This is the very basic question I want to explore in this book. A corollary question is: Has this always been the case? The short answer is: no. I will explore this in more detail in the next chapter, but for now let’s simply accept this: there was a long period of time when no one dominated anyone else (the Long Paleolithic), but since domination and inequality exist today, we can ask: when did they start and why? When did political and economic interactions shift from reciprocal/cooperative (as existed in the Paleolithic) to non-reciprocal/competitive and why?
I wrote the word “Long” before Paleolithic above to emphasize that for most of human existence, beginning approximately two and half million years ago (B.P.) until the beginning of the Neolithic Era about 10 thousand B.P., humans lived in a world without institutions of political control. These institutions only began to be created by aggrandizing men (perhaps) toward the end of the Paleolithic in a few hunter-gatherer-fisher societies (see Tlingit Storaging and Stratification below) and really became a worldwide phenomenon in the Neolithic Era (began ca. 10 thousand B.P.).
Let me say something about the title, The Creation of Domination. In an earlier form, I called it: The Fabrication of Domination. I could have written it Scripting Domination, or in a Foucauldian sense, Discoursing Domination. I chose Creation because it is broader than scripting, which has a mental connection with writing. Foucault’s term discourse is closer to what I am trying to convey, since humans have been creating “truth scenarios” since the beginning of conscious thought. A scenario is a “setting” or a “picture” of how things are or how they should be. I am interested in those “truth scenarios” that aspiring men used throughout history to control the minds of others in order to access prestige, power and property.
Manufacturing a “truth scenario” is not the domination of the bully, with his big muscles or powerful weaponry (though we will see plenty of that in our historical tour); but rather it is the domination of the “smart bully,” the one who comes to understand human nature, societal rules and uses them to control the thought processes of those he wants to follow him. This bully is a creative bully. He fabricates domination by creating ideological concepts, rules and offices, which are his shield behind which he (and those close to him) can operate to his (and their) advantage.
In much of this work I am going to focus on prehistory and ancient history. I am also going to try to enlighten the reader by showing how these epochs are related to what is going on in our world today. Inequality is a part of the last 10 thousand years of human history and we still live in a world where the rich and powerful – people, classes and nations – dominate those who are less wealthy and powerful. But human life has not always been stratified, as I will explain.
Inequality
What is stratification? Haviland states that stratification has six elements:
(1) Hierarchically ranked groups with relatively permanent positions;
(2) Differential sources of power;
(3) Differential access to resources;
(4) Cultural and individual distinctions;
(5) An ideology that provides a rationale for the stratified system;
(6) A relative degree of inequality of rewards and privileges.
We will see that these sociocultural formations developed with vigor at the beginning of the Neolithic Era and have evolved to bring us to the present-day in which our world is sharply divided into the haves and have-nots. A world of inequality, wherein billions live on less than a dollar a day; a world where in the USA (the richest country in the world) 48 million are at risk of hunger and the streets are littered with homeless people.
I will investigate why this is (the easy part) and what can be done about it (the difficult part).
Scripted Domination
Aggrandizement and domination are not necessary, but they are widespread and even revered in some societies today. Playing Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas famously stated: “Greed is good,” which some may take as the motto of capitalism in America.
But greed was bad for millions years of human existence, and, incidentally, still is in some societies in the world today. That is, domination and acquisitiveness are not evenly spread throughout history or geographically in our modern world. Nevertheless, after the Neolithic Revolution (about 10 thousand B.P.) we do not find entirely egalitarian societies anymore, defined as societies without political institutions, .a managerial élite or statecraft. Once a surplus existed, opportunistic men went to work to fabricate ideas that gave them exclusive control of scarce resources and the labor of others. In the beginning, this was done on a petty scale, as when a family headman organized farm work and the storage of crops in a central granary. And, as time passed, it was done on a grand scale, as with the lavish lifestyles of kings, pashas and emperors who funneled most of the wealth produced in their domains into the coffers of the state, with the state often using much of this surplus to wage war in search of more lucre and power. As Marshall Sahlins (1972) noted, the potential drawback of storage is exactly that it created a contradiction between wealth and mobility. A sedentary group with stored wealth was vulnerable to marauders. It was a new situation that necessitated some form of leadership and management, which opportunists were more than happy to supply.
The scripts of aggrandizing leaders are usually boldly declared. “I am the head of the household because my father was head of the household.” Or, “Allah has chosen me to lead my people.” Other scripts that allow exploitation and domination can, however, be subtler. For example, Noam Chomsky has indicated in his book, Manufacturing Consent, that the American systems (political, economic and communicative – the media) have the function of fabricating an overall acceptance of the status quo. That is not to say that there is some sort of conspiracy to accomplish this, but rather that it is a normal result of the overall social system and culture that have evolved in the United States. It is subtle domination because most people don’t know they are being dominated and many would deny it if told so.
Domination was built throughout history by scriptwriters i.e., leaders and their immediate supporters. As Goody has shown, early scripts were oral, while later domination has been fashioned through written documents (see especially the case on Catalonia in chapter 8). Everywhere, and throughout history, chiefly leaders and their shamans and priests have put together discourses or ideologies that proclaimed and justified their rule.
Every society has a script, a set of cultural ideas and norms that govern thought and behavior. Without a poleconomic perspective, one might think that such scripts merely evolve in a very benevolent, or at least benign, fashion. Rather, I would say that there is agency behind every script and the agents writing the societal script do so in ways that can benefit them at the expense of others. This is consciously exploitative in some cases and in others the long history of institutional construction has created political structures than aggrandizers can, and do, use to exploit others. It was Karl Marx who said: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
It is the actions of such agents and their creations that are the subject of this book.
Mystification
In the cases I present in this book we will see office-holders (headmen, chiefs, shamans, lairds, priests, counts, kings and a variety of viziers) creating mystifications, obfuscations, camouflages and illusions in order to fashion and maintain domination of others. These are forms of lies that office-holders have been telling people ever since there was something worth lying about i.e., wealth and power. To be sure, this is only one aspect of office-holding. Many office-holders throughout history have served their people well, but many have not. Furthermore, as political institutions were carried from generation to generation, they built up the potential for exploitation by those wielding power. In other words, exploitative potential is embedded in many of the political institutions that came down to us from the past. Thus, exploitation by leaders is not merely a problem of personality or individual makeup, but rather it is a structural problem.
In chapter 2 we will see some data from my fieldwork in Sisalaland, Northern Ghana. This is a case of lineage headmen using divination to control the behavior of fellow kinsmen through the use of mystical ideas surrounding soothsaying and ancestral sacrifice.
We will see the beginnings of mystification in a case concerning little chiefs and shamans among the Yokut-Mono of early California (chapter 3). In this example, together chiefs and shamans tried to control people through the use of magic and fabricated ideas related to curing and witchcraft.
In the case of the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast we will see a different kind of mystification – the use of elaborate display through feasting, designed to impress lesser people in society, for after all, that is what domination is about – impressing the minds of subalterns (chapter 4). Men seeking power long ago learned that ceremonies and feasts were effective displays providing them with a mystical shield of uniqueness, setting them apart from the masses.
We will also encounter other means of mystifying the minds of English peasants in our discussion of the Enclosure Movement in England (chapter 4). In England, élites used the Power of the Pen and legislation to extract more and more wealth from those toiling to make a living out of the soil. We will see more of the Power of the Pen at work in the creation of serfdom by Catalan élites in the Middle Ages in chapter 8.
In the case of the Scottish Highlands (chapter 6) we will see lairds ruling their clans through mystified concepts handed down through generations, acting as war chiefs who were to provide protection and redistribute goods in time of need. This “benign mystification” provides us a case that demonstrates how a less-extractive polity can quickly become converted into a highly exploitative one, as changes in the historical-material conditions in the Highlands led lairds to become avaricious landlords. It is a case of the benign mystification melting away in the heat of avarice, though the newly rapacious landlords developed a new form of mystification to justify evicting people from their lands. It was an ideology revolving around the Enlightenment concepts of efficiency, profitability and progress.
When we get to the African kings of the Kongo, the mani kongo of the Kongolese Kingdom and the nyim of the Kuba Kingdom, we will encounter elaborate efforts to create mystifications to define the monarch as a Divine King, and therefore an absolute ruler who could operate from behind a deified shield of invincibility (chapter 7).
In the case of the fabricated structures of domination in Catalonia, we will see two forms of scripting at work: that which transformed peasants into serfs (chapter 8) and that which allowed the formation of an Extortionist State (chapter 9).
Finally, in the concluding chapter, we will see how the American government has evolved into a system of official secrecy, obfuscation and malfeasance to feed the military-industrial complex (and its newer incarnation, the state management system), all in the name of “spreading democracy” to the world. Apparently, Manifest Destiny is one of our mystifications. Out-of-control consumerism is another.
Secrecy
In every case I present in this book, élites hoard, manipulate and fabricate information creating a camouflage of office. We call them state secrets today, but office-holders kept information from the public long before the state was created. Keeping secrets was crucial to the process of dominating the masses once leaders sensed the need to create a separate informational set for themselves and another (less informative) set for the general populace.
We will see societal managers using secrets to rule – beginning with a very ephemeral political system of the little chiefs of the Yokut-Mono Amerindians and ending up in the well-developed state system in Washington DC.
Malfeasance in Office
Using the techniques of scripting false information for the public and developing other forms of mystification, office-holders through history have created a shield of office that allows them to manipulate the stated intent of office, its official reason for existing. Behind closed doors, under the camouflage of office, office-holders in our empirical cases will attempt to hoodwink their followers and engage in personal aggrandizement and activities that benefit their small cadre of family, friends and advisors. In a more general sense, the few feed at the trough at the expense of the many.
Most of our examples will come from the politico-jural domain i.e., from government office-holders operating behind closed doors in pursuit of private goals. Yet, recent disclosures of sexual-abuse in the Catholic Church offer a sobering look at how office-holders, in this case religious ones, can commit crimes while in office and be protected by their fellow officers behind what might be termed the “shield of hierarchy.” In our modern world, the Pope, Cardinals, Bishops and other high ranking officers of the Church live in a world that resembles a Medieval fortress, perhaps only highlighted by the vanities of their miters and capes (Miller 2010:38). But the problem is not architecture or costumes, but rather that “the bishops and cardinals who manage the institutional church lived behind guarded walls in a pre-Enlightenment world. Within their enclave they remain largely untouched by the democratic revolutions in France and America” (2010:38). In this cloistered milieu, church officials have developed a subculture in which they have taken on an air of invincibility and privilege, which in most cases can merely be seen a silly arrogance, but which, in a few cases, has led to sexual deviance by some in the church, while other ecclesiastical officers have participated in concealing these crimes from the public and secular officials. After it was publically revealed that as a Cardinal, the present Pope (Benedict XVI), failed to defrock a priest who abused 200 deaf children and slowed down the process of defrocking another priest in California accused of raping a girl in his parish, the Pope lashed out at the news media. “Faith, he said, allows one not ‘to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion’” (2010:38).
The point is: Behind closed doors, office-holders have the power to act in secret. We will see examples of malfeasance in office and cover ups in the public domain by government officials, corporate officers and, in this instance, a religious hierarchy. We will also trace the rise of the power structures that have allowed such misconduct by office-holders, beginning with the advent of the first chiefships in the early Neolithic.
Which is Normal: Cooperation or Competition?
The short answer is both. Cooperation has been adaptive for human populations. Brian Fagan (1995:131) says, “In later prehistoric times, relationships with neighbors were to assume ever-increasing importance in adaptive strategies for long-term survival.” As with other animals, the individual human being only has to do two things in life: eat and avoid being eaten (harmed or killed). We have a limited physique to compete with lions or a charging bull elephant. Most animals can easily outrun us. What we have is a well-developed brain, communicative skills and cooperative groups. Living and cooperating in groups throughout the Paleolithic allowed human society to survive and prosper and spread around the globe.
But individuals have the capacity to be selfish and, given a chance, some will compete for scarce resources. I call this kind of person an aggrandizer (see more definitions below). But the evidence we have for Paleolithic human beings is that foraged vegetable foods was abundant in most cases and even hunters did not have trouble killing large game. Not only did humans use weapons to hunt, but set traps. Note the wide variety of animals taken by Peking Man: two species of deer, elephants, two kinds of rhinoceroses, bison, water-buffalos, horses, camels, wild boar, roebucks, antelopes, sheep, saber-toothed tigers, leopards, cave bears and hyenas (Clark 1972:37). Even in the Weichsel Ice Age in North Central Europe (ca. 115,000-20,000 B.P.) there existed ample game and forage at the edge of the ice. Fagan (1995:131-132) says:
A rich mammalian community flourished in these diverse environments. It included bison, horses, reindeer, and mountain goats in more rugged areas; large herbivores like the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and wild ox were common in the open steppe. The human inhabitants could exploit not only a rich animal biomass but also a wide variety of plant foods, including blueberries, raspberries, acorns, and hazelnuts.
In Southwest France between 35,000 and 12,000 B.P. climatic conditions were even milder, which led to high concentrations of humans living off of abundant reindeer, wild ox, bison, ibex, red deer, chamois, woolly rhinoceros and mammoth (Fagan 1995:132). The human population there made direct adaptive responses to highly favorable ecological conditions. In addition to foraging for plant life, these early humans also fished, as fish hooks and harpoons have been recovered by archaeologists. It appears that fishing assumed a greater importance at the very end of the Ice Age.
Early humans also scavenged for meat (Fagan 1995:120). With archaic scrapers they were able to salvage scraps of meat left by predators, which they may have been able to scatter upon encountering the feeding frenzy.
We have evidence of human scavengers from both archaeology and ethnography. J. G. D. Clark (1952) reports that there is archaeological evidence of scavenging among several Mesolithic groups. Ethnographically, among the modern-day Hadza of Tanzania, twenty percent of all medium/large animal carcasses acquired by hunters (O’Connel, Hawkes & Blurton Jones 1988). The authors infer that scavenging could have been an important source of animal tissue in the hominid world if they could displace large carnivores from the carcasses.
Between 30,000 and 10,000 B.P. a series of hunting and gathering societies in Central and Eastern Europe, known to archaeologists as the Eastern Cravettian Complex scavenged mammoth cemeteries, places where lots of animals died in floods; but they were less interested in meat, than in the massive bones, which the Cravettians used to build houses in a more or less treeless environment (Soffer 1993).
Another strategy, similar to trapping, was driving herd animals over precipitous cliffs, a practice common in Southwest France during the last Ice Age and a strategy also of early Amerindians (Powell 1987).
With plentiful roots, fruits and other vegetable sources, this meat diet, obtained by hunting, scavenging and trapping, would have been more than adequate. It seems unlikely that Paleolithic humans would have had any significant reasons to come into major conflict over food. It is more likely that they sought cooperation with neighbors.
Cooperation and balanced reciprocity (equal giving and receiving) is ancient, embedded in the psyche of Humankind and ubiquitous among tribal peoples in our world today (though selfism and selfish people are always present too). Noncentric, reciprocal exchange is the dominant exchange system prehistorically and among many rural peoples today (though it can also exist in urban networks too). In reciprocal exchange systems, transactions are bundled with and channeled by social obligations. In the main, in such societies the ethos stresses the group over the individual. This cooperative system was one of the key components in the ability of bodily-weak human beings to survive in Nature.
Sharing resources developed as an evolutionary strategy in human populations and is as ancient as human consciousness. Studies have shown that sharing food buffers against daily variance in types and amounts of food acquired by foragers. It levels risk. It is part and parcel of our ancient social nature, the human tendency to live in groups and seek approval of others.
It is my thesis that once a storable, stealable surplus came into being, reciprocity was slowly replaced by redistribution, flows of resources through the hands of ambitious men. With the passage of time, these men were able to justify siphoning from the resource flows to build up an authority structure, often called a chiefdom (see chapter 5). At that point in history, reciprocal exchange and redistribution were joined by a new flow of resources, what Frederic Pryor calls a transfer. This is a one-way transaction whereby goods and services were given to the leader without a direct return (though leaders always couched transfers as being reciprocal exchange). They spoke of “intangibles” that group members would receive by giving up tangibles i.e., their property and labor. Centric transfers included services performed and tribute and taxes paid by the masses to the leader or a leadership institution e.g., a priesthood in control of a state-temple complex.
How is it that the long-established ethos of sharing was supplanted with redistribution and finally with a centric (one-way) transfer of wealth from producers to a non-working élite? The key lies in the fact that once an opportunity for self-interestedness arrives through historical-material conditions, there are aggrandizers ready to seize the opportunity. Pryor shows that Sahlins’ balanced reciprocity, in ethnographic practice, is not always perfectly balanced. Almost always it remains an un-reached ideal. Acquisitive people fudge reciprocity when they can.
It is likely that at the start of the move away from balanced reciprocity, men seeking power would have first created dependencies along kin lines e.g., within corporate lineages, by manipulating reciprocal exchanges. They would have used the ethos of group sharing and protection to their advantage, ever so slightly altering it as time went by, projecting it to a higher level.
Furthermore, historically, with increasing complexity and development, balanced reciprocity declined. What is more, anthropologists have found that reciprocity faded as community size increased (which has been growing through history). It was harder to maintain face-to-face kin exchanges in larger more complex settlements and people were forced to interact with non-kin in new and different ways. “New and different” was music to the ears of men seeking power because in the new conditions they perceived opportunities.
Of course, this is what Polanyi meant in his title, The Great Transformation – the shift from sharing within the context of kinship structures to a societal form in which integration based on reciprocity was replaced by forms and processes that allowed wealth to flow upwards into the hands of the powerful – the newly self-appointed scriptwriters.
What is power?
Power is the central most cogent defining characteristic of civilization, that complex social organization that emerged primarily after the domestication of plants and animals (Haas 1982). It is also the main concern of this work, the rise of poleconomic domination.
Power is the ability to make others do what they do not want to do or would not otherwise do without some kind of pressure or inducement. Power is more complex than force. In reality, as Phillips & Sebastian note:
the ability to apply force is only one factor in the complicated equation of political power. Such power is an amalgam of traditional rights, individual prowess, charisma, inheritance, threatened or actual force, persuasion, gifts or outright bribes, available social and religious sanctions, and more (2004:234-235).
What is more, men seeking power have to constantly weigh the possibility or probability of resistance to their exercise of power. If they encounter resistance they need to adjust the kind of pressure they will apply. Rather than pressure, they may decide to use inducements, real or imagined.
Simple influence can be powerful and that would have been the only source of social power in most groups in the Paleolithic Era, since there was no way to gain more material leverage over others (weapons were weak and available to all equally. Also, a Paleolithic person could not store up wealth to move ahead or on top of others). Power is the obverse of dependence and Paleolithic people were very independent, having access to everything others could access. Power can be formulated as:
PAB = DBA
The power of A is equal to the dependence of B on A
(A & B being individuals or groups)
However, once accumulation became possible in some societies, powerful men could emerge and make others dependent on them. If a big man had more wealth, better weaponry, was braver in battle, had more people backing him and so forth, he could rise to prominence and situationally develop followers during his lifetime. There had been situational leaders in the Paleolithic Era e.g., men who were expert hunters leading a hunting party. But there were no hereditary “hunting chiefs.” When a good hunter died, he could not pass an “office” on to his son or any other man.
Situational leadership lapped over into early surplus-available societies. These leaders had influence, not authority. Such were the war chiefs of many Amerindian tribes, but also Greek chiefs (sing. basileus). For instance, twenty-eight centuries ago, the minor Greek chief named Odysseus was putting together a raid into Egypt. He had to outfit nine ships and secure the services of enough raiders to make the assault successful. Even though he held the “office” of basileus he had to induce Greek men to follow him. He brought this off with an enormous six-day feast.
Odysseus was what I will refer to below as a little chief or influence chief. He could not simply command his men, but rather had to coax them with material rewards before and after the foray. In this regard, Pomeroy writes:
Reciprocity – mutual and fair exchange – which governs all social relationships in the Homeric world, is the core of the leader-people relationship. The giving and the receiving should ideally balance one another. So, too, fairness is the rule in the apportionment of the spoils of war. Following a raid, the booty is gathered together. First the leader takes his share (and something extra as the leader’s “prize”) and, under his supervision, special rewards for valor are given out. The rest is then given to the men “to divide up, so that no one may go cheated of an equal share.”
A leader who keeps more than he deserves or distributes prizes unfairly risks losing the respect of his followers. For a chief, being called “greedy” is almost as devastating as being called “cowardly.” In short, a basileus cannot afford not to appear generous and openhanded. Similarly, Homeric chiefs engage in a constant exchange of gifts and feasts with other chiefs and important men. This is both a way of showing off their wealth and a means of cementing relationships, winning new friends, and establishing obligations through a display of generosity (Pomeroy et. al. 1999:57).
As an influence chief, Odysseus put together a political package comprised of inherited wealth, authority, generosity, individual bravery and strong managerial skills. In spite of this impressive amalgam, there were several occasions when Odysseus’ hetairoi (subalterns) simply refused to obey him. Once, when his followers decided to do the opposite of what he had ordered, Odysseus could only say that as ‘one man alone’ he was forced to abide by the “will of the many.” Later in history, many chiefs, kings and emperors will not act as ‘one man alone.’ They will have armies, viziers, priests and a whole array of cultural ideas and institutions to back up their commands.
One of the trends in history has been the steady conversion of situational power into official power i.e., an office-holder came to have authoritative power by virtue of occupying a hereditary position in the social structure. This kind of power is simply called authority. Unlike the fragile quasi-authority held by Odysseus, eventually power-seekers formulated strong chiefdoms and kingdoms where leaders came to have great authority and sometimes absolute authority. We will see this later in the case of the Kuba Kings (chapter 7) and we will see in the case of the lairds of the Scottish Highlands how influence chiefs were able to transform themselves into landlords so powerful that they could eventually throw their followers off their land and replace them with more profitable sheep (chapter 6).
Thus, power is something that can be built, but it can also be lost, as in the case of the Kuba Kings who held the power of life and death over their subjects at one point, but eventually lost control and the kingdom disintegrated.
An individual or societal bully can be stronger and overpower a weaker opponent, but for lasting control, the use of authority (institutionalized power) is a better option. This is because authority is about controlling the minds of the people. It is for this reason that aggrandizers in history have fabricated rules, roles, offices and institutions to install themselves and their heirs in positions of authority. Nevertheless, if historical-material conditions change, as we will see in the Kuba case (chapter 7), the fragility of authority is exposed and we will see Kuba leader-managers lose control of their society.
Increasingly through history’s course the quest for power became more and more about using power and prestige to access wealth, often through controlling the labor of the masses; but archaeologists tell us that finding the “absence of wealth is not evidence for absence of power.” Once great wealth was accumulated, obviously it became a source of power and prestige; but initially, in the beginning of the development of complex societies, there were likely many domains of power in which aggrandizers could seek power and prestige without necessarily leaving behind evidence of personal wealth for the archaeologists to find. There must have been many false starts to the institutionalization of aggrandizement.
And power is not like a single thread that once found can be fashioned into a rope. Power can be created and accessed in many places in society. But it is not fixed or finite. There can be a constant reworking of power by community leaders and different groups who at times share, sometimes subvert and at other times forcibly assert themselves unilaterally. Again, power can be loose, conditional and unstable.
Strategic Man
Domination began with the appearance of the first storable, stealable surplus and aggrandizers jumped at the chance to begin strategic behavior. Mainly this occurred after the domestication of plants and animals (the Neolithic Revolution or Agricultural Revolution, ca. 10 thousand B.P.). But in a few cases, such as among the fishers of the Northwest Coast of the Americas, a storable, stealable surplus was possible.
These hunter-gatherer-fishers of the Northwest Coast were unlike the non-storing hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic because they engaged in large-scale wars and enslaved their captives (see chapter 4). They developed chiefdoms, a stratified society and even institutionalized slavery. Their strategic actions were prompted by the existence of massive fish runs that enabled them to catch and smoke large quantities of dried fish, which was a storable surplus, which strategically-thinking men used as a power base.
This set up competition between chiefs and between these wealthy fishers or as I will refer to them – storagers – and their neighbors. Some of these warlike peoples living on the northern Canadian coast raided as far south as California for loot and slaves.
These people had simple tools and weapons and lacked agriculture or herds, yet their surplus wealth generated institutions of inequality and warfare. When Humankind learned to domesticate plants and animals, warfare and political domination grew to far greater heights than among the Northwest Coast Amerindians, but the impetus was the same: a storable, stealable surplus that generated strategic, self-enhancing behavior among aggrandizers.
As Colin Gray notes in his book on military strategy: war and strategic thinking are part and parcel of human history. “It does not really matter whether strategy is ‘done’ by ‘food, horse, and guns,’ or by cruise missiles, spacecraft, and cyber-assault.” His point is that war always has been a historical fact and will be with us in the future because human beings think strategically i.e., they strive to “power up over the next guy.” It is a fact of history that aggrandizers want the prestige, power and property that derive from war and think and act strategically to increase their accumulation through warfare. Professor Gray continues:
The most basic reason why strategy appears, alas, to be eternal lies in our human nature. I do not mean to imply that human beings, either individually or as security communities, are in some essential way incapable of learning ‘the ways of peace.’ Many, perhaps most, people can and do ‘construct peace’ by doing it, which is to say by acting and thinking in a cooperative rather than a conflictual mode. The fatal problem is that history as we know it yields no grounds for optimism that a positive kind of peace can be constructed to a degree which precludes the appearance of objective threat to security. As the aphorism has it: we have seen the problem and it is us (1999:68).
The ethnographic and historical examples in this book confirm Gray’s perspective, if from a slightly different angle. War is one form of domination, but there are many others, especially in the formation of political orders and the performance (and misdeeds) of officers in chiefdoms, kingdoms, states, empires and nation-states.
Yet in the last chapter, I turn again to war and its relationship to our American government. We will see the same processes at work in what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex that has been transformed into the even more powerful state management system. As the creation of domination and inequality have occurred throughout history by means of élite fabrications, scripting, mystification, manipulation of information, secrecy and in-office shenanigans, they continue within the bowels of our government and in the backrooms of the state management system (see chapter 10).
My attempt here is to blend our understanding of what has happened in history and what is going on today so that we can begin to get a handle on what to do about the fact that our democracy is being eroded by the manipulation of aggrandizing officers in Washington DC.
Civilization & Cynicism
Some may take my approach to the history of Humankind as cynical. It is only one perspective on civilization and admittedly not a common one. Yet I feel it is an overlooked viewpoint and one which has much to inform us with regard to the world today and the future of Humankind.
Certainly, most writers who tackle the rise of civilization and the history of the world focus on all the productive aspects of change through time. For example, Colin Renfrew writes that the long human trek through prehistory led to the development of civilization, which includes “massive technological achievements – architecture, technology, literacy, travel – and the products of human culture – language, literature, music, the visual arts” (2008:ix). Other authors stress the “rise of the state” and other achievements that seem benign. When these writers and scholars ask: “What is it that we have become?” they see progress in the answer.
I am asking the same question, but I am trying to look a little deeper, to peek below the surface of “apparent progress” and ask if the very construction of civilized institutions has created a set of structures that allow and even encourage misbehavior on the part of our government officials. Some will see this as a pessimistic and derisive endeavor. I see it as essential to the effort to create and sustain a democracy.
SOURCES – INTRODUCTION
Brumfiel, Elizabeth. M. 1992. Breaking and entering the ecosystem: Gender, class and faction steal the show, American Anthropologist 94:551-567.
Chomsky, Noam & E. S. Herman. 1988. Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon.
Cosmides, Leda & John Tooby. 1992. Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In: Barkow, J., L. Cosmides & J. Tooby (Eds.) The adaptive mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 163-228.
Dunbar, Robin I. M. 1998. The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology 6:178-190.
Emerson, R. 1962. Power-dependence relations, American Sociological Review 27:31-41.
Fagan, Brian M. 1995. The people of the earth: An introduction to world prehistory. New York: Harper.
Foucault, M. 1981. The order of discourse. In: R. Young (Ed.). Untying the text. London: Routledge.
Gray, Colin. 1999. Modern Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haviland, William A. 1975. Cultural anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Hill, Kim & Magdelena Hurtado. 1989. Hunter-gatherers of the New World. American Scientist 77:437-443.
Kohler, T. A., M. W. Van Pelt & L. Y. L. Yap. 2000. Reciprocity and its limits.. In: Mills, Barbara J (Ed.). Alternative leadership strategies in the Prehispanic Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 180-206.
Mauss, Marcel. 1967 (1925). The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. New York: Norton.
Phillips, David A. Jr. & Lynne Sebastian. 2004. Large-scale feasting a politics: An essay on power in Precontact Southwestern societies. In: Mills, Barbara J (Ed.) Identity, feasting and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 233-258.
Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The great transformation. New York: Rinehart.
Pomeroy, S. B., S. M, Burstein, W. Donlan & J. T. Roberts. 1999. Ancient Greece: A political, social and cultural history. New York: Oxford University Press.
Powell, Bernard W. 1987. Were These America’s First Ecologists? Journal of the West, Vol. XXVI: 3:17-25.
Pryor, Frederic L. 1977. The origins of the economy: A comparative study of the distribution in primitive and peasant economies. New York: Academic Press.
Renfrew, Colin. 2007. Prehistory: The making of the human mind. New York: The Modern Library.
Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
Sober, Elliott & David S. Wilson. 1998. Unto others: The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Soffer, Olga. 1993. Upper Paleolithic adaptations in Central and Eastern Europe and Man-mammoth interactions. In: Olga Soffer & N. D. Praslov (Eds.). From Kostnki to Clovis. New York: Plenum Press, 31-47.
1. THE PALEOLITHIC & THE EMERGENCE OF COMPLEXITY
The Long Paleolithic
The Long Paleolithic was an enormous expanse of time. Roughly speaking, we can take the Paleolithic to be about two and a half million years in length, starting with the development of the first stone tools in Africa. It is all of human existence prior to the development of agriculture and herding (domestication). This occurred in what anthropologists call the Neolithic Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution. I will come back to this revolution because it holds the key to the development of institutions of domination.
As an analogy, we can visualize the Paleolithic being twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes on a twenty-four hour clock. This is important because the communalistic ethos that dominated human thinking and behavior before the Neolithic Revolution would be radically changed by the rise of selfism and factionalism by a newly formed managerial élite.
The Paleolithic involved thousands of centuries. During this time, humans lived in relative peace and without institutions of domination. I say “relative” because there had to have been sporadic conflicts between different groups of people but large scale warfare was not possible because weaponry was limited stone knives, wooden spears (some tipped with stone) and clubs. In the late Paleolithic human had more sophisticated weapons e.g., bows, arrows, better spears and knives, as well as poison, which could be applied to arrowheads and spear points. Still, these were anything but weapons of mass destruction. Most conflict was domestic, internal to the band of individuals living as a unit. If the Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers of Africa are any indication of how conflicts were handled in the Paleolithic, disputes were informally resolved. The Ju/’hoansi studied by Richard Lee (1979) lacked formal dispute settlement procedures and when conflict occurred Professor Lee says he observed those involved “voting with their feet.” In other words, they walked away. There were occasional Ju/’hoansi fights, even murders; but no open warfare. It is likely that for most of the Paleolithic this was also the pattern.
The general outline of Paleolithic life is as follows, Paleolithic people:
Had a very simple technology including tools, skills & social organization of production
Had a subsistence system capable of producing only relatively low levels of caloric energy
Had a diet in which plants contributed more calories than animals
Placed little emphasis on accumulation or ownership
Had a cultural emphasis on mobility to avail themselves of dispersed foodstuffs in the natural larder
Had low population density determined by the wild foods collected during the season of minimum availability
Were organized in bands of fifty persons or less, in most cases
Relied on loosely organized and fluid kinship as the basic principle of social organization (people could change groups more or less at will)
Shared almost everything with others based on what Leacock calls a system of “total sharing”
Had ownership limited to a few personal items
Lacked full time specialists beyond the sexual division of labor
Lacked ascribed statuses and roles
Engaged only in limited raids and feuding, not true warfare
Lacked authoritative chiefs or a managerial élite
These were foragers, with hunting bringing in desirable variation from the more stable vegetable diet. Eleanor Leacock (1982) notes that for modern day hunter-gatherers land is their larder. They accumulate little beyond what they can carry, with an emphasis on mobility and adaptability to the land rather than on accumulation. This is a very important point. Little was stored and little was accumulated beyond what one could carry from campsite to campsite. Most food, clothing, weaponry, foraging tools and housing could be made in each camp anew from nature’s larder. All were free and uncontrollable goods.
I am not so much concerned with inter-group conflict as I am with what went on within a given group, which is called a band. Within bands there were no hereditary chiefs or institutions of domination. There were situational leaders who had dynamic personalities or qualities that made them such, but they used their skills for the good of their group, not to set themselves up over others, either politically or economically. That is not to say that some were not selfish, but in a small group there was a great deal of pressure to place sharing above hoarding and in the long-run, no doubt most aggressive persons curtailed their acquisitiveness to minor things. Aggressive deviants were shunned or expelled from the band.
Economists and political anthropologists have found it difficult to incorporate emotional potentialities as motivational factors in decision-making. Yet, there are aggrandizers in all human groups as well as more passive persons. Aggrandizers tend to want more prestige, power and property than average people. Aggrandizers can be referred to as:
Super-achievers
Reputation-builders
Aggressive men
Acquisitive men
Go-getters
Ambitious men
Self-starters
Success-oriented men
Power-seekers
Alpha males
Doers
Additionally, men with triple-A personality types (aggrandizers) tend to aspire to the following roles in society:
Managers
Leaders
Organizers
Caretakers
Commanders
Guardians
Big men, chiefs, kings, emperors, presidents/prime ministers
Priests and other courtiers near political power
Provincial governors
Any role that gives them privileged access to more prestige, power and property
Perhaps the best term of all for an aggrandizer is “opportunist.” I'm going to guess that about ten percent of all men are born opportunitsts. Whatever we call such personality types, today these are (wo)men who want more power and wealth and go after it, often at the expense of others and the social good. It is in their nature to do so.
Super-achievers were born in the Paleolithic too, but they were not able to act on their desire to be better than others in the sense of having more property or power than others. They lacked the capacity to produce institutional inequality, though in the limits of their lifetimes they could achieve situational inequality e.g., being a better hunter than other men or excelling at dance, song or crafts.
Such go-getters have always existed and will always exist. Today they run corporations and countries. But during the Paleolithic they were handcuffed by the lack of a technical base and the absence of a storable-stealable-surplus.
Let's deal with the first limit to domination – the minimal weaponry of the Paleolithic. Since the Agricultural Revolution men have dominated others using weapons, which have become more and more sophisticated and deadly through time. In the Neolithic weaponry escalated from stone and wood to metal weapons. Such weapons did not exist in the Paleolithic. There was no way for one band to have better weapons than another band. All had very rudimentary weapons, as I mentioned above. And they had them equally. This is an important point. Any ten-year old kid could make the most sophisticated weapon of the day – a bow with poison-tipped arrows, and these did not show up until approximately 15 thousand B.P. (Fagan 1995:157). Before that weapons would have been even easier to manufacture.
So even if there were men who would have liked to dominate others with weapons, it was not possible. There were aggressive men who killed others, but they could not dominate a group using weaponry. The others in any band had the same level of weaponry, so conflicts were limited to small skirmishes and raids and death due to raids must have been minimal. For a visual example of such skirmishes, see Robert Gardner’s ethnographic film Dead Birds, which was shot in New Guinea. The only death these bow-and-arrow wielding combatants could pull off was that of a small boy ambushed at a waterhole. All other injuries resulting from direct skirmishes, in this film, were superficial flesh wounds. Domination based on war was not possible in the New Guinea Highlands or in the Paleolithic.
The other handcuff was the readily available food supply, which again was equally available to all. The ten-year old kid with a bow and arrow could bag a large animal just like a thirty-year old. Furthermore, anthropologists know that most of the food was not animal meat, but was roots, fruits and other natural foods gathered mainly by women.
This sexual division of labor has been part of the human approach to getting and processing food from the beginning of humanity on the planet. Ethnographers who have studied modern-day hunter-gatherers have found it so; archaeologists studying the economic activities of early inhabitants of the Guilá Naquitz Cave in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico found that men hunted and women processed the foods (Flannery et. al. 1986) and I and many other ethnographers have found it to be ubiquitous in the study of tribal societies.
While women in the Paleolithic probably worked longer hours than men gathering and processing foodstuffs, in general the workday was short compared to work in agricultural societies, as the food could be collected in a couple of hours each day and processing would have been minimal . When men went on extended hunts, they ate off the land. Anyone could simply pick their food, which also applied to clothes, houses, weapons’ materials and bits and pieces for prestige items (e.g., crafts) – all were free in nature and anybody could easily transform such natural products into what was needed to survive. No one person or class of persons could have a monopoly on anything.
Another way of saying this is that there was no storable-stealable-surplus in the Paleolithic. A Paleolithic aggrandizer could not store up nature’s food or other materials for himself. He could, but it would give him no advantage. It would be a waste of his time and people would have thought him daft. That’s the key. When an anthropologist asked a man living in a band society in modern day Africa why he didn’t collect foodstuffs from the forest and store then in their camp, the man looked at the Westerner as if he was crazy. “Why would I do that? They are already stored for me in the forest!” It would be a waste of energy to store them.
Furthermore, it would be a waste of time to steal food, clothes or any goods because they could be made easily with no chance of social retribution. No band had any goods that other bands did not have. Why risk a counter-attack by stealing food or goods from another group when they can be had more easily and more safely by gleaning them from nature.
All this is to say that there was no surplus that could be rationally hoarded to the advantage of any individual, class or group. Nature held the surplus for all on an equal basis.
However life was not a free-for-all. Paleolithic people had culture, that is, they communicated with one another and developed concepts about how one should behave. These codes, many together anthropologists call an ethos, were passed on orally from one generation to another. That is, children were socialized to societal norms. But the codes of the Paleolithic were communalistic i.e., they stressed the good of the group over and against the good of any given individual, go-getter or not. Opportunists had to be content to be “better” in ways that benefited the group, to exercise their aggressiveness to bring in more food or protect the band from raiders, etc. Paleolithic super-achievers could also pursue non-threatening avenues of self-expression e.g., dancing, craft production, art (somebody painted all those rocks and cave walls) and shamanism. These activities garnered Paleolithic women and men prestige, but not property or power over others.
The codes that emerged during the Paleolithic tended to stress social responsibility. When men, women or children broke the rules, they were punished by being shunned or verbally condemned by other band members, either directly or through gossip. In rare cases, very deviant individuals were physically punished. Richard Lee reports a case where a Ju/’hoansi forager committed murder and was himself shot by several men, his lifeless body lying in the middle of the camp riddled with arrows. Then each member of the band, including women, passed by and took turns firing more arrows into the body until each member of the social group had symbolically participated in the execution of the deviant. The imagery is clear: the entire band killed the deviant; no one individual killed him.
It would appear that Paleolithic humans understood that their individual fates were dependent on group unity and that individuals should act in ways that supported group customs and their joint survival. Additionally, it must be stated that human groups were not isolated from one another, nor were they inherently hostile to others. Alliance and exchange between groups was a universal fact in hominids and humans (Bender 1985). This fact would have mitigated against open, long-term hostility between groups.
The Andaman Islanders provide a good case for presuming that the Paleolithic was a time of egalitarian practices and group behavior that was more peaceful than that which developed after the Neolithic Revolution. The Andaman Islanders provide good data on this because it was a relatively uncontaminated foraging society when A. R. Radcliffe-Brown studied the islanders between 1906 and 1908 (1948 [1922]:43ff).
Living in natural abundance, the Andaman foragers shared food and land was a free good. Portable property was private, but freely shared for the asking. Their custom of giving presents was a further leveling mechanism; plus, a giver would expect to receive a counter-gift at a later date and derived prestige by giving. This was a form of institutionalized redistribution. C. Daryll Forde noted that in such egalitarian societies a person stood to gain more by giving than by hoarding. The giver gained prestige and also security by his or her generosity, since the receiver of the gift must give a counter gift or lose face (1960:337). In such a society a strong ethos of sharing and equality built up in response to an abundance of food and the impossibility of amassing a surplus in order to dominate or outdo others. Radcliffe-Brown found that competition was limited to an attempt to outdo others at generosity. There was abundance or a natural surplus, but it was non-storable, or rather the storing of any natural food would be a ludicrous endeavor.
Radcliffe-Brown notes that three kinds of people were accorded honor and respect in Andaman society: (1) older persons; (2) persons endowed with supernatural powers; and (3) individuals with certain skills that benefit society e.g., hunting or expertise in battle, as well as persons who are relatively free of ill temper and who are very generous and kind. This “inequality” was limited to the lifetime of the individuals being so honored by the group. The accord afforded these special persons was not institutionalized, nor could it be passed on to anyone else.
The Andaman people lived in a relatively egalitarian society, but anthropologists have not found any society that was completely egalitarian or free from aggrandizement by some members of the society. Even those very simple bands that have been ethnographically investigated show that some male dominance is exhibited in social interaction between the sexes and there are occasional efforts by aggrandizers to counter the general ethos of egalitarianism. That would indicate that for the very long Paleolithic, society must have struggled mightily to prevent opportunists from rising, stressing communitarian values over individual bluster.
It would seem that such tendencies toward males trying to exert themselves in a dominant position over females and the efforts of aggrandizers, both male and female, to demonstrate their individualism are naturally embedded in their biology and mental structures. These tendencies show up in every society anthropologists have studied and presumably existed in the Paleolithic. But having said that, some societies are much more egalitarian than others. There are societies today that exhibit near equality, when compared to the majority of modern ones and many more existed in the two and half million years of the Paleolithic.
We have ethnographies that show us societies that come close to pure egalitarianism. In them, some privilege is usually accorded to those of advanced age, following the assumption that they have acquired wisdom and knowledge through the years, yet if an older person lacks these qualities, he or she will routinely be ignored or accorded nominal respect (Lenski 1984:110-111). In addition to age, gender is a divisive fact of life in all societies, though again, there is much variation in how sexual differences play out.
I agree with Marvin Harris that, contrary to those who would wish otherwise, we have no empirical evidence to indicate that any society is, or has ever been, entirely free of some form of discrimination (1993:59). For instance, in the politico-jural domain men always have a slight edge, taking the lead in political and military affairs. Elsie Begler (1978), writing from the point of view of a female anthropologist, claims to have discovered in her cross-cultural analysis of various ethnographies on hunting and gathering societies that there are some where males seem to dominate, as in some Australian Aborigine groups and in Eskimo societies. She has termed these types of groups as “semi-egalitarian” while other groups, such as the Ju/’hoansi and the Mbuti, she says display equal status among males and females and these groups are termed: “pure egalitarian” societies.
The ethnographic facts from the Ju/’hoansi and Mbuti do not support her assertions. Certainly, they are “relatively” egalitarian, but males still hold a slight edge in social affairs in both. Among the Ju/’hoansi, men more often hold positions of influence, as spokesmen and healers. This fact was expressed to ethnographers by both Ju/’hoansi women and men (Shostak 1981:237). There are differences in initiation rites as well: men’s are held in private, while those of women are public affairs. Perhaps the greatest indication that there is a significant difference between men and women is seen in the fact that if a menstruating Ju/’hoansi woman touches a man’s arrows they are thought to be polluted and will not find their target. On the other hand, men cannot pollute anything they touch. With such differences in Ju/’hoansi society we cannot consider male and females to be equals. Furthermore, of the bare-handed, non-lethal attacks recorded by Lee (1979:453) 97 percent were men beating women and only one recorded case of a woman attacking a man. These were bare-fisted affairs, but men hold all the weapons and have a coercive psychological edge in gender relations. Shostak (1981:307) writes that when a conflict appears to be getting out of hand between men and women, the men are known to say: “I’m a man. I've got my arrows. I am not afraid to die.” Lee found that of known murders among the Ju/’hoansi, all were perpetrated by men and some of the victims were women.
For the Mbuti hunter-gatherers, Colin Turnbull (1961:127) indicated that men and women are not entirely equal. In public affairs, men took precedence. Men were associated with, hunting, power and influence, while women were allied with nurturing roles. This dichotomy came out violently in male-female relations, since Mbuti men said that a certain amount of wife beating was good (1961:127). These data do not indicate a peaceful and fully egalitarian society.
These ethnographic facts are important for our interest in how domination was fabricated in history. If there is, as I have tried to show, a natural tendency for men to dominate women and for opportunists to try to assert themselves and attempt to control other people; then the fact that such tendencies were kept to a bare minimum for most of the two and a half million years of the Paleolithic Era is an astonishing fact. In Paleolithic bands, and in most of the living foragers today, self-aggrandizement was kept at a minimum and was channeled into socially acceptable activities e.g., hunting, foraging, shamanism and being one who could entertain others around the campfire. In all those societies no major institutions of domination emerged, in spite of the biological and personality-based propensities toward aggression and self-aggrandizement found in all human groups.
This raises the question: what is different about those few forager societies where institutions of domination emerged and the vast majority of foraging societies where institutions of inequality did not? The answer is to be found in the material conditions of each society. In short, when ecological conditions provided aggrandizers opportunities to use their assertiveness to amass and store wealth, go-getters began to formulate ideas and rules that provided them and their families an edge over others in the political realm based on their advantage in economics. This did not happen in Paleolithic foraging societies because their survival depended on cooperating as a tight-knit unit in which aggressiveness and competition were kept to a bare minimum. Thus, these societies remained comparatively peaceful.
In the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes put forth a view that men were naturally aggressive and war was an inevitable consequence of humans living in social groups (1997 [1651]). Wherever humans gather there will also be the potential, even the probability of war. To Hobbes, this state of “war of all against war” necessitated government to guarantee peace. Since Hobbe’s groundbreaking work on the subject, thinkers have tried to understand why men are aggressive and why war is so widespread, in spite of Hobbes early belief that the application of Reason by government officials would curtail war.
Sanderson (nd: 38) notes that “social hierarchies have to be explained by all three modes of Darwinian conflict explanation, i.e., bio-, eco-, and poli-materialistically. Social hierarchies are biologically rooted but elaborated by a range of social and cultural conditions, especially those relating to economic and political organization.” In other words, hierarchies don’t emerge unless certain conditions external to the biology of humans stimulate them.
Still, some humans hunger for recognition. Jerome Barkow (1989) says that there is a natural human hunger for prestige that dominates much human behavior. Joseph Lopreato (1984) notes that humans have an innate desire for creature comforts. This is linked to primates as well where researchers have seen the virtual universality of hierarchy, especially in terrestrial primates, from whom humans are, descended (van den Berghe 1978).
Hence, we see that biological anthropologists and sociobiologists are linking primate and human behavior, indicating that the desire for status, esteem and prestige are natural to both ourselves and our primate cousins. Because of this genetically lodged desire it is very difficult for societies to maintain the egalitarianism of the non-storers of the Paleolithic struggled to maintain. Indeed, in both the egalitarian societies of the past and in the relatively egalitarian societies still in existence, equality is constantly challenged by those who want to rise above others (Woodburn 1982; Cashdan 1980).
In this sociobiological view, equality seems to be constantly challenged because the human brain has evolved to seek higher status and the material and positional indicators of success, all of which have a positive impact on reproductive success. That is, throughout the history of hominid evolution those individuals who exhibited such indicators left more progeny than those who did not. This is why in the long Paleolithic there was a constant need for the band to keep opportunists in check.
Stephen Sanderson (nd: 27-28), in wondering about Marvin Harris’ analysis of the emergence of social class, says:
…Harris never does explain why ruling classes form in the first place, except to point to certain infrastructural conditions necessary for them to exist, and thus he begs the very question he is trying to answer. It is true that certain minimal infrastructural conditions are required for their existence, but this does not adequately explain why they [ruling classes] always arise when those conditions are present. Surely there must be something about the organism and the way it interacts with those conditions that call forth ruling classes. In stressing the economically and politically egalitarian nature of band and tribal societies, Harris also fails to point out that these societies are filled with prestige- and power-seekers whose ambitions must be curtailed by the rest of the society, lest they get out of control. There seems to be more than a desire for love and approval that is motivating leaders in such societies; it is simply that they have to be satisfied with those outcomes because they will not be permitted anything more [my insert].
Sanderson apparently is in line with my way of thinking on aggrandizement. I see self-aggrandizement as a natural tendency that is hyperactive in more or less ten percent of any human population regardless of their social formations, cultural values or material conditions. However, this tendency toward achievement can be curtailed or stimulated by variation in any number of these factors. One of the most stimulating causes of the release of aggrandizement by go-getters is the change from a non-storing to storing economy, a change that was set in motion by changes in the physicality or material circumstances in which the society operated.
But self-aggrandizement can be unleashed in a society that already values capitalistic aggrandizement, for example, the case of Robert Mugabe and his band of thieves in Zimbabwe. Southern Rhodesia was a capitalist society par excellence and even though Mugabe and many of the freedom fighters that overthrew the capitalist regime of Ian Smith espoused socialist ideas, when they took over the reins of power they seized the opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of the Zimbabwe people. This was a case where the material environment did not change, but a change in political power did, unleashing the pent up self-aggrandizement in Mugabe and his cronies.
Sanderson feels that Marvin Harris’ theoretical point of view –cultural materialism – is a good one, but it is inadequate because of Harris’ failure to embrace sociobiology as another form of materialist explanation. He says “we need to push cultural materialism in a sociobiological direction and show how the two perspectives can be synthesized into a more comprehensive perspective whose explanations will be more adequate.”
I agree that biology, environment and social forms interact, with causation primarily going from material to social to mental constructs. Sanderson (nd: 33-35) nicely lays this out in some detail in what he calls “Principles Concerning the Deep Wellsprings of Human Action.” The eight principles are:
(1.) Like all other species, humans are organisms that have been built by millions of years of biological evolution, both in their anatomy and physiology and in their behavioral predispositions. This means that theories of social life must take into consideration the basic features of human nature that are the products of human evolution.
(2.) The resources that humans struggle for, which allow them to survive and reproduce, are in short supply. This means that humans are caught up in a struggle for survival and reproduction with their fellow humans. This struggle is inevitable and unceasing.
(3.) In the struggle for survival and reproduction, humans give overwhelming priority to their self-interests and to those of their kin, especially their close kin.
(4.) Human social life is the complex product of this ceaseless struggle for survival and reproduction.
(5.) Humans have evolved strong behavioral predispositions that facilitate their success in the struggle for survival and reproduction. The most important of these predispositions are as follows:
• Humans are highly sexed and are oriented mostly toward heterosexual sex. This predisposition has evolved because it is necessary for the promotion of humans’ reproductive interests. Males compete for females and for sex, and females compete for males as resource providers.
• Humans are highly predisposed to perform effective parental behavior, and the female desire to nurture is stronger than the male desire. Effective parental behavior has evolved because it promotes reproductive success in a species like humans. The family as a social institution rests on a natural foundation.
• Humans are naturally competitive and highly predisposed toward status competition. Status competition is ultimately oriented toward the securing of resources, which promotes reproductive success. Because of sexual selection, the predisposition toward status competition is greater in males than in females.
• Because of the natural competition for resources, humans are economic animals. They are strongly oriented toward achieving economic satisfaction and well-being, an achievement that promotes reproductive success.
• In their pursuit of resources and closely related activities, humans, like other species, have evolved to maximize efficiency. Other things being equal, they prefer to carry out activities by minimizing the amount of time and energy they devote to these activities. A Law of Least Effort governs human behavior, especially those forms of behavior that individuals find burdensome or at least not rewarding in and of themselves. The Law of Least Effort places major limits on the behavior of humans everywhere; much behavior can only be explained satisfactorily by taking it into account.
(6.) None of the tendencies identified above are rigid. Rather, they are behavioral predispositions that move along certain lines rather than others but that interact in various ways with the total physical and sociocultural environment. The behavioral predispositions tend to win out in the long run, but they can be diminished, negated, or amplified by certain environmental arrangements.
(7.) From the above it follows that humans’ most important interests and concerns are reproductive, economic, and political. Political life is primarily a struggle to acquire and defend economic resources, and economic life is primarily a matter of using resources to promote reproductive success.
(8.) Many, probably most, of the features of human social life are the adaptive consequences of people struggling to satisfy their interests.
I agree with Sanderson that fundamental causation lies primarily in the biostructure and ecostructure (what Harris would call the material world, although he ignored the biostructure largely). These material factors affect social structure and mental formations. But it does not end there. As Sanderson points out “Once structures and superstructures have been built by biostructures and ecostructures, they may come to acquire a certain autonomy. New needs and new interests may arise therefrom, and these new needs and interests, along with reproductive, economic, and political interests, may form part of the human preference and value structure characteristic of the members of a society.” In other words, it is not mutually exclusive causation for which we should be looking, but rather how biostructure, ecostructure, social structure and mental structures interact to produce any given repetitive set of human behaviors, what Ruth Benedict in 1934 called “The Patterns of Culture” (Benedict 2006).
The End of the Ice Age
The end of the Ice Age brought dramatic changes to human populations, but not the rise of chiefs in those societies lacking long-term storage of foodstuffs. Food storage was very important in the development of complexity. Food storage based on wild foods that facilitated greater sedentism was also an impetus to population expansion. In the southern Levant, there is clear evidence that the subsistence and nutritional foundation for the expansion of population appeared several thousand years before the appearance of domesticated plants (Kuijt 2008).
After about 15 thousand B.P., with global warming, the population curve of hunter-gatherers approached that of carrying capacity (Fagan 1995:154). This had two main effects on human life: (1) mobility was reduced and (2) humans were forced to innovate more to exploit local food resources more intensively.
It is significant, however, that the innovations in technology and food-getting techniques were made by individuals and small leaderless groups and not by the rise of formalized leadership. The only exceptions to this were to be found in those hunter-gatherers that lived in environments that offered them foodstuffs that could be stored on a long-term basis e.g., where there were seasonal phenomena such as caribou migrations, salmon runs or especially plentiful but seasonal nuts or cereals. In these few environments humans harvested enormous quantities of food in a short time and also processed and stored them for later use. Brian Fagan writes:
Storage technology now assumed a new and pressing importance; thousands of fish were dried on racks in the sun or in front of fires, and the nut and wild cereal harvest was placed in basket- or clay-lined pits for later consumption. There was nothing new in the notion of storage; much earlier in prehistory, big-game hunters, for example, dried meat and pounded it to make food on the march. What was new, however, was the notion of large-scale storage in more sedentary settlements, where mobility was no longer a viable strategy. By using storage and by careful seasonal “mapping” of game, plant, and aquatic resources, early Holocene hunter-gatherers compensated for periodic food shortages caused by short-term climatic change and seasonal fluctuations (1995:159).
I will discuss examples of these in more detail later (see: Tlingit Storaging and Stratification in chapter 4).
The end of the Ice Age also saw greater sedentism with some groups living in a central base camp and part-time in satellite camps. As it became necessary to exploit local resources more thoroughly, groups began to exchange more goods and materials with their neighbors. Society was becoming more complex, but the new more multifaceted food processing and tool-making tasks could be handled by individuals and families without overarching leadership. The complexity becomes reflected largely in increased evidence of a rich symbolic life, especially in planned burials and the presence of elaborate grave goods e.g., at the Ertbølle cemeteries in Denmark, dating to about 7 thousand B.P. (Price 1985).
Some few communities developed even greater complexity since they settled in marine environments, which served as seafood cornucopias (Binford 1983). It is unclear, however, when these more complex societies developed or how much there complexity corresponded to the Amerindians of the Northwest Coast or other documented hunter-gatherer-fishers. Professor Fagan (1995:168) says, however, that they likely developed within the last 10 thousand years and they must have had some “form of simple social ranking, probably based on lineages or other kin groupings, marked by differences in wealth, diet, and burial customs.” What we do know from the archaeological record is that they had food storage, highly developed hunting, fishing and plant processing equipment and were involved in exchange of exotic objects and raw materials with neighboring groups. They also had highly developed rituals and an elaborate ceremonial life.
At this point we only know that with these Stone Age hunter-gatherer-fishers and documented ones like the Northwest Coast Amerindians, the Calusa and the Chumash maritime resources played a significant role in stimulating rising complexity.
The Natufians of the Levant
Effective farming is known to have been established in the Levant about 9 thousand B.P., but between 14 thousand and 10 thousand B.P., there emerged simple hunter-gatherers known collectively as the Kebarans. After 11 thousand B.P. archaeologists noticed the presence of pestles, mortars on higher ground, which were implements used to process harvests of wild seeds and nuts. The climate was becoming increasingly arid and warmer, but grains and nuts had adapted to the higher terrain of the hill country and these foragers were beginning to focus on harvesting nature’s wild crops.
Archaeologists call the reapers the Natufians. Their culture expanded rapidly to the edges of the Mediterranean zone within about 1,500 years, during the short cycle of wetter climate (Fagan 1995:169-170; Henry 1995). Radiocarbon dating shows that the Natufian hunter-gatherers appeared right around the time of the Bølling-Allerød Interstadial, a warm period that began 14,500 years ago and lasted until the beginning of the Younger Dryas Stadial (a.k.a. “the Big Freeze”) that was a geologically brief cold climate period between approximately 12,800 and 11,500 B.P.
When the climate warmed, woodlands of pistachio, almonds, olive and oak began to flourish in the hills of the Levant, along with lush fields of wild wheat and barley. The Natufians continued to hunt deer and gazelle as had been their habit as hunter-gatherers, but they also began to change their lifestyle. They became sedentary, built permanent houses of stone and wood (with smaller satellite encampments), ritually buried their dead in or around their houses and ground up wild cereal grains and nuts with grinding slabs, mortars and pestles, used animal bones to make tools and art (wall paintings, figurines and jewelry) and settled into communities that sometimes comprised several hundred people. They also had axes, which archaeologists think were used to clear forests to enhance the growth of wild foods. As hunter-gatherers who harvested and processed wild foods, the Natufians were the “next-to-last stop on the long road to farming” (Balter 2010:404).
Clearly, the Natufians were more complex foragers than their predecessors, the Kebarans. They harvested wild emmer wheat and barley as well as nuts, which were highly productive resources that could easily be stored. Storage became a way of life for the Natufians. Their storage bins were not unsophisticated, even when compared to those in more advanced Neolithic farming communities. Storage as a way of life became a stimulus for change. The result from such storaging was larger settlements, surrounded by outlying camps where the harvesting a processing took place. Processed crops were then transported to the main settlement for storage.
That the Natufians were involved in harvesting emmer can be seen in the fact that it has been found in village storage bins and shows signs of morphological change from its wild state (Noy et. al. 1973). Repeated harvesting of wild foods can alter their morphology, but also eating grains can produce dental changes in humans and this is observed in Natufian skeletons recovered archaeologically in the Levant (Dahlberg 1960). Yet another indicator of change is that the Natufians made a transition to a broader pattern of exploiting existing resources, with not only an increasing focus on grains and nuts, but also a noticeable pattern of change in the fauna harvested. When they could, the Natufians killed large ungulates, but the archaeological record at Natufian sites shows that as time passed they utilized more and more non-mammalian and invertebrate species, both terrestrial and aquatic (Flannery 1969). The move into aquatic species is also evidenced by recovered harpoons and fishhooks of bone from such sites as the Mt. Carmel Caves (Garrod 1958).
These hunter-gatherers were not simply picking a small quantity of food for immediate consumption, something hunter-gatherers had been doing for eons. Rather, they were collecting wild grains and nuts for storage. As reported by Kuijt & Finlayson (2009), recent excavations at Dhra′ near the Dead Sea in Jordan provide robust evidence for sophisticated, purpose-built granaries in Natufian groups that had not yet moved to full-blown agriculture (ca. 11,300–11,175 B.P.). These scholars contend that their findings support the idea that Natufians were involved in the deliberate cultivation of wild cereals in the Natufian Era, “nudging nature,” so to speak.
Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, the granaries were located between residential structures that contained plant-processing stations. The storage bins represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which preceded the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.
In addition to storage bins, archaeologists have recovered the basic Natufian toolkit, which included querns, grinding slabs, mortars, pestles and bone sickles with inlaid microlithic flint blades. Apparently, the Natufians were foraging a combination of wild and managed resources, which illustrates a major intensification of human-plant relationships. These were “farmers” in the sense that they were harvesting wild crops and perhaps prodding them along with selective care. It was the beginning of a revolution that would rock the world (see Jared Diamond’s 1987 article: “The worst mistake in the history of the human race”).
The Natufians were on the road to domesticating plants and the Natufian burials also show another form of domestication. Several graves contained human bodies along with dogs (Davis & Valla 1978). Sheep have also been found in PPNA levels (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period ca. between 11,500-10,500 B.P.) at Jericho (Clutton-Brock & Uerpmann 1974).
I am interested in the Natufians because they began to store wild crops and my thesis is that storage of foodstuffs altered society, bringing hierarchy into human life. This would have begun as the development of segments within society e.g., descent groups and cults. There is some indication that the Natufians were developing a strong ancestor cult, which some scientists take as an indication that corporate descent groups were forming as domestication proceeded. At Jericho clay figurines were uncovered (Garstang & Garstang 1948) and later Kenyon (1954, 1957) found modeled plaster skulls. Since her initial find, other plaster likenesses have been unearthed in different sites and the artisans producing the plastered skulls were working within the framework of powerful on-site traditions (Goren, Goring-Morris & Segal 2001).
In other words, the production of the plaster skulls was not an isolated event, but part of a traditional effort to immortalize one’s ancestors and establish a linkage to them.
As yet, the Natufians were not planting crops, as traditional farmers were to do later, but as time passed the area was becoming drier and the wild cereal crops were moving successively uphill as the valley floor was drying out. The Natufians followed the uphill movement. They still had nuts in the fall and gazelle had been plentiful, but as aridity increased the cereals and the grasses that fed the game were declining. Some scientists believe that this led the Natufians to begin to “nudge” nature by selectively planting cereals in prime locations to augment nature’s efforts (Childe 1936; 1952; Bar-Yosuf 1998).
The concept of “nudging” is not fanciful. There is ethnographic evidence that hunter-gatherers are known to help nature along by caring for plants they wish to harvest. For example, the Andaman Islanders avoid digging their favorite tubers during the season of new growth in order to ensure a better crop later. They also protect the seed crop of other wild harvested plants (Heizer 1955:5). Professor Heizer also reported that in Wisconsin the Menomini Amerindians purposely allowed some of their harvested wild rice to fall back into the water to ensure a better harvest the next year. Additionally, Professor Julian Steward (1929) gave an account of the Owens Valley Paiute, who lived in hunting and gathering bands, but who irrigated wild food sources to augment nature’s efforts at production. Steward said that the Paiutes were observed artificially reproducing natural conditions that existed in the swampy lowlands of their world in East Central California.
Lawton et. al. (1976) observed that this “nudging” should be considered a form of vegeculture by hunter-gatherers. Other scientists also provide documentation of other California Amerindians who engaged in environmental manipulations such as burning of woodland-grass, chaparral and coniferous forest zones to enhance plant and animal food resources (van Zeist 1967; Lawton et. al. 1976:14). My research in Northern Ghana brought home to me that people living in nature are intimately involved with manipulating their environment, in this case by Sisala men burning the bush to enhance their farming and hunting efforts. It is clear to me that prehistoric humans would have had very specific knowledge of their surroundings and would have experimented with ways to influence nature’s efforts when that seemed in their best interest.
For example, Professor Kroeber (1925:220) reported that the Pomo Amerindians of Northwest California altered stream courses to enhance the runs of certain desirable fish. Heizer (1955) reported similarly on several Amerindians and the nomadic hunting Yukaghir of Northeast Asia, all of whom helped nature along.
With such intimate knowledge of nature it is logical that hunter-gatherers could, if necessary, augment nature’s efforts. If any hunter-gatherers felt stressed they had the appropriate information to make the transition from hunting to agriculture. It appears that the Natufians were among the first to do so.
In the Natufian interaction with a changing and stressing environment – according to some archaeologists –they were “prodded” toward true agriculture. This dynamic would be repeated in many parts of the world in the next few centuries e.g., archeological information points to two other centers of early cultivation, central Mexico and the middle Yangtze River in China that led to the emergence of complex civilizations (Bar-Yosuf 1998).
But storaging and cultivation were not the only options to stressed Natufians. Some made this transition, but other data indicate that when faced with the onset of arid conditions in the Levant, some Natufians also became more mobile, pursuing traditional hunter-gatherer techniques for survival (Munro 2004). In other words, instead of moving “forward” to full-blown agriculture, they reverted to their previous mobile hunting and gathering lifestyle. Of course, evolution is not linear, nor did the Natufians know that soon agriculture would become the dominant way of life in the world and that hunter-gatherers would become marginalized in a predominately agricultural world.
Those who did choose to focus on harvesting wild grains and nuts gave up their mobile lifestyle and settled down, becoming both hunter-gatherers and reapers of wild foods. Almost all foragers do this, but these Natufians began to do something different – they reaped and stored their harvests. That the Natufians used nuts and cereals is evidenced in the food-processing tools found by researchers and, most recently, by new research at Dederiyeh Cave in northwest Syria. There, archaeologists found remains of stone buildings occupied between 14,000 and 13,000 B.P., one of which was heavily burnt, charring and preserving many plant remains. Researchers found that nearly 90% of the 12,000 plant fragments studied come from pistachio and almond trees. They also found significant amounts of wild wheat. These findings show that Natufian plant use was intensive, knowledgeable, and complex, but as yet there are no signs that the Natufians actually cultivated plants at Dederiyeh rather than simply collecting them wild.
Why did some Natufians choose to abandon the mobile lifestyle of the past? Bar-Yosef, Anna Belfer-Cohen of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and other researchers have argued that the Late Natufian culture was a response to the cold, dry conditions, which shrank the resource-rich forests and made wheat and barley more scarce. They contend that the region's hunter-gatherers turned to agriculture to cope with this scarcity.
Yet some scientists doubt that there was an environmental crisis or that the Natufians turned to agriculture to cope with dire conditions. Since in the Late Natufian there are signs of increased mobile hunting and gathering, some say that the increased mobility was not a likely "trigger for agriculture" and may have in fact postponed it.
Barbara Bender (1978; 1985) believes that since hominids and humans have long been involved in alliance and exchange, this fact would have created debts on the part of some who could not repay return gifts unless they intensified their economic activities. For her, the impetus to agriculture came from social causes, rather than environmental ones. Following this theory to the Natufian situation, one would see that they were preconditioned to create agriculture when other pressures came to bear.
Whatever the causes, eventually agriculture did develop in the Levant. Some archaeologists have concluded that farming began not during the cold, dry climate that hit Natufian culture at its height, but only after warm, moist conditions were restored about 11,600 B.P. In this theoretical stance, prehistoric peoples were both forced into agriculture by growing populations that fostered renewed sedentism and enticed by the increased rainfall and milder climates that made farming more attractive and less risky.
It is likely that there was no single cause of the development of agriculture, but rather a variety of factors which came together in various parts of the world to produce a new economic way of life that would then spread by diffusion.
The move to agriculture involved a process of interactions between human beings and their environment and was not just a single event that occurred in Natufian culture, but rather one that spread rapidly around the world in a matter of approximately 8 thousand years (Cohen 1977:5). Thus, within the blink of a geological eye, humans went from being largely non-storers to having great stores of food the required management.
Recent excavations at Dhra′, Gilgal I, Netiv Hagdud, and WF 16 illustrate that at the end of the cold Younger Dryas climatic period (between 12,800 and 11,500 B.P.) for the first time Natufians started to live in larger communities that were based, at least in part, upon systematic large-scale food storage of cultivated plants, the first people in the history of the world to do so, based on our current knowledge. Their economic activities were tipping over into true agriculture. These actions initiated changes in wild plant foods, and although the vegetation was not morphologically changed into domesticated plants, some of the plants used in the PPNA (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period ca. between 11,500-10,500 B.P.) were undergoing changes as a result of economic intensification and selecting desirable wild crops (Kuijt & Finlayson 2009).
The presence of a surplus that had to be stored evolved in the Natufian Era. Excavations at Dhra′ in Jordan indicate that the early granaries were located in external locations between other buildings. Starting about 10,500 B.P., food storage began to be located inside houses and within the next thousand years we see dedicated storage rooms appearing in Natufian villages. This transition from extramural to intramural storage system probably reflects changing systems of ownership and property, with PPNA granaries being used and owned communally but with later granaries becoming owned by households. A process of individualization was afoot, evidenced in a shift from communalism to corporatism, that is the move from a relatively unsegmented society to one with inwardly-looking units – usually family groups.
This transition from non-storing to a storing way of life was not a trivial one since it required a great investment in labor. For example, the PPNA granaries were sophisticated constructions with air flow to prevent mold, a slopped floor to thwart excessive water accumulation and protection against rodents. Remnants of morphologically wild barley, lentils and oats have been found in them. Radiocarbon dating indicates the granaries were constructed about 9,900 years ago. While these seeds were wild, their storage in great amounts show that the early Neolithic peoples were intervening in natural processes to harvest, treat and store wild grains and legumes. Kuijt & Finlayson (2009) indicate that these complex storage systems with subfloor ventilation were a precocious development that preceded the emergence of almost all of the other aspects of the Near Eastern Neolithic package – domestication, large-scale sedentary communities, and the embedding of a degree of social complexity. The authors indicate that storage necessitates changes in social structure, observed by researchers both in evidence of increasing corporate activities and the development of hierarchical structures. Storage also represented a critical form of risk management and economic intensification.
Another indication of the nucleation or decreasing communitarianism of the PPNA Natufian village is seen in the fact that the inward-oriented construction pattern of the houses points to living spaces for nuclear families in Southern Levantine communities, while in the north larger, multi-cellular dwellings still predominated, where presumably communitarian values remained stronger (Banning & Byrd 1988:70). The authors indicate that such Southern Levantine houses probably were constructed to maximize privacy and personal storage space and may have contained private granaries.
We are interesting in such granaries for what they stimulate in terms of social change. Testart (1982) indicates that food storage, population growth, sedentism and social inequality are often inter-connected behavioral phenomena. The Natufian data support this. With greater sedentism, increased birth rates and increased quality and quantity of domesticated foods we see the foundation for political and economic developments. Increased wealth rarely goes without political changes in order to manage and defend the surplus.
The ancient town of Jericho is an example of a Natufian settlement that seemed to need to defend its stored wealth. It had a watchtower, a perimeter wall and at least three ditches dug beyond the wall (Kenyon 1954, 1957; Bar-Yosuf 1988). Dame Kenyon interprets these fortifications as defenses against repeated incursions by nomadic raiders. Professor Palumbo (1987) also sees evidence in the archaeological data collected at Jericho of social stratification.
Further data pointing toward hierarchy in the PPNA Natufian culture comes in the form of monumental buildings, which were actively functioning in the inter-group and intra-group levels. At the inter-group level, the monumental edifices served as a means to establish command over an area with favorable resources. At the intra-group level, the buildings functioned to found and regulate new types of socioeconomic relations. Central themes in the changes occurring at this level included intensification of production and the growing prominence of long-term delayed-return obligations within the socioeconomic system (Naveh 2003). The changing economy was clearly having an effect on social relations, making them more hierarchical.
For our purposes, what is important and interesting is that among the Natufian hunter-gatherer-“nudgers” we see signs of emerging social hierarchy accompanying the storing of cereal and nut crops. While archaeologists cannot recover all the human interactions associated with hierarchy and the emergence of leadership, burials reveal that some Natufians were being interred as élites, their grave goods contrasting with commoner burials. The single most important symbol of élitism in Natufian grave goods was the presence of dentalium seashells, but decorated graves also included bone necklaces, perforated fox teeth, partridge-joint pendants and other items not found in undecorated graves (Belfer-Cohen 1988:302). There are also indicators that family-group burials were important, signifying the rise of the corporate nature of the family in society (Byrd & Monahan 1995).
Data on hierarchy in Natufian sites shows that there appeared to be a move toward emphasizing community control over the individual, perhaps as a means of dealing with potentially fissive social, environmental or economic changes being experienced (Kuijt 1996:332). It appears that in the Late Natufian Era (12,800–11,500 B.P.)., when nascent agricultural production had begun, individual striving and hierarchy were becoming a problem and, according to Kuijt, counter-revolutionary moves were being made to emphasize older concepts of egalitarianism. It seems there was a struggle afoot between group values and the rising power of families and aggrandizing individuals. Social cohesion was being brought into question by the divisive influences of the new economics (Kuijt 1996:333).
Professor Kuijt believes that there could have been fear of the loss of influence by those witnessing the rise of one family’s power due to their economic advantage. It seems that there was a struggle going on in society between egalitarian values and the new way of life brought on by agricultural production.
As I have indicated in this present work, the transition to centralized leadership would not have been an easy one and the Natufian data support this view. There would have been a social struggle between individuals and families that wanted to continue with the ways of the classless past and those individuals and families advantaged by fortune in the new way of life based on a significant investment in storaging.
Why did Foragers begin Farming?
The answer to this question is that not all foragers did switch to farming. Some remained foragers when faced with population pressure or other problems in the environment by simply moving away to find new terrain to exploit. As population pressure increased after the last Ice Age, some moved into relatively harsh environments and adapted their hunting and gathering skills to fit in such marginal lands e.g., the Eskimos of the Arctic or the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa.
At first those foragers faced with stress would have moved into environments similar to the ones they knew previously, but as populations grew and pressure on the land increased, some foragers took a second approach to survive. They stayed put but changed their sources of food e.g., the Northwest Coast Amerindians who began to supplement their forest foods with marine resources. Those fortunate enough to have ample natural resources such a great salmon runs and abundant sea animals never had the need to begin farming. Some of these hunter-gatherers later came into contact with farming folk and rejected agriculture as a way of life.
The third strategy, a variant of staying put and changing the resource base, was to intensify the existing food resources, the approach that eventually led to effective farming. This was a gradual process, one that took place at different times in different places on the globe. When thinking about this monumental shift from foraging to agriculture it is important to remember that foragers knew their environment very well. As Kent Flannery (1986) has pointed out, hunter-gatherers were always involved in economic behavior and in their foraging activities they had to know their fauna and flora intensely, the result of observing natural processes and forms.
When faced with pressures from population growth or environmental stresses in a circumscribed state (when they could not easily move to greener pastures) stressed foragers began to modify their collective memories regarding their economic behavior. This led to modification of the existing food resources, beginning with the first attempts simply to alter the densities of specific plants (Reynolds 1986). Flannery and Reynolds combined computer simulation with excavation of Guilá Naquitz Cave in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico to determine how this transition occurred there. They concluded that once stressed foragers began to experiment with “nudging nature” and their efforts paid off, they continued to modify their behavior, which in turn altered the seeds and plants they had begun to intensely exploit.
One strategy associated with incipient agriculture was storage, both as a food source and as seed to plant. In the case of Guilá Naquitz, it appears that climatic changes forced these early Amerindians to become more efficient gatherers of maize seed and to grow beans, which allowed them to reduce their search area and become sedentary farmers. Such early foragers experimenting with augmenting nature’s way would not have seen themselves as doing anything radical, but rather as simply getting food in a natural world. Nudging nature and then farming more effectively in a fixed area were simply, to them, variants of the same process – making a living by observing natural processes.
The Need for Storage
Agriculture is a seasonal activity in most environments, requiring storage of food for the off-season. This required early farmers to increase their built environment, producing grain bins, jars, clay-lined pits and similar means of storing grains and legumes. Food production also led people to settle down to a fixed habitat that provided arable ground and the post-Agricultural Revolution growth of population also contributed to sedentism since groups could not move about as was previously the case.
People came to live in villages with stores of valuable food. Shortages of land and food would have naturally led to disputes, a situation exacerbated in mixed farming communities where people had domestic animals that were inclined to eat crops. Most farmers wanted animals, not only for their meat, but also for their milk and skins that could be used for clothing, tent coverings and even shields. Consequently, people had to deal with the conflicts produced by animals.
In my research in Northern Ghana I found that one of the main sources of conflict between farmers revolved around the domestic animals of some families eating the crops of others. In the early Neolithic no doubt similar disputes had to be managed, which required institutional mechanisms for dealing with conflict. In many cases, as with the people I studied in Northern Ghana, these disputes were largely handled by headmen of kin groups, but chiefship was also a solution, as we will see in chapter 5.
Domestic animals may cause problems, but they are also forms of storage. They are “calories on the hoof,” so to speak, while granaries holding grain are another way of storing calories. In my studies of farming in Northern Ghana, Sisala farmers grew yam tubers, which had the advantage of not requiring storage, as they could be left in the ground until needed and they could be easily carried back to the village in small amounts. The threat of theft was sometimes dealt with by one member of the kin group living at the farm, which because of free-roaming goats and sheep in the village, had to be in the distant bush.
Both yams and grains were also protected by ritual means, no doubt fabricated by early farmers as a supernatural means of deterring human thieves. These safeguards involved magical symbols and shrines placed in the fields to prevent thieving, but storage of grain was different. It had to be transported from the farms to storage bins in the village where it could be more adequately protected from thieves, insects, rodents and mildew. Therefore, growing grain crops produced security and transport problems. Foragers could more easily bring their food back to camp as needed without such problems, since food was consumed more or less immediately. Farmers had many more issues revolving around the storage of food.
In mixed-farming communities with domesticated animals there were other issues. In Ghana I saw some groups who tethered their animals in order to have their crops close to their dwellings, but that required a great deal of labor. Animals had to be moved several times during the day. Most chose to have their fields at a distance in order to have free-roaming goats and sheep. This then produced a transport problem, solved in Northern Ghana by human labor, that is, women carrying containers of maize, beans, millet and guinea-corn back to granaries in the village. Sort of an interim solution was to have small, wattle-fenced kitchen gardens next to the house out of which a family could eat some food without going to the farm to procure it. That cut out some of the transport problem, but also required labor to construct and maintain the wattle-fences.
Foragers had no fertilization problem, but farmers did. Fixed fields without periodic fertilization lose their productive power over time. There are two solutions: apply manure or other means or ritualizing the soil on fixed fields; or move the fields periodically. Most early farmers chose the slash-and-burn mode of farming, in which farmers cut the brush and small trees in the bush in order to plant their crops. In Ghana, the Sisala farmers piled brush up against larger trees to burn them and then hacked at the charred wood to eventually topple the tree, but that could sometimes take a year or two, so they simply farmed around large trees. The slash-and-burn method produces a form of fertilizer in the ash produced by burning, but it is one that cannot be sustained on that cleared land indefinitely, so fields must be moved after a few years.
The problem is this: villages are difficult to move but fields can more easily be moved. The general solution used by most early farmers was to rotate satellite fields around a fixed village.
The point is that the switch from foraging to farming produced massive changes in lifestyle, changes that increased labor time, a drawback that was offset by the fact that farming produced more food, which could be stored against future shortages.
But storage produced other difficulties for the early farmers. Stores had to be managed and protected, organization that would have profound impact on the way humans were able to live as the Neolithic progressed. The management of stores, disputes and other exigencies – such as the need to defend against raiders – brought leadership to the fore and gave aggrandizers an opportunity to establish themselves as headmen of various sorts.
Those few groups who continued to follow the hunting and gathering way of life did not develop hierarchical leadership, but farmers and herders did because, unlike simple foragers, they had to protect their stored calories, a vital hedge against the real threat of hunger.
In spite of the need for renewing the soil by adding manure or intercropping, around 7,500 B.P. some farmers in Europe developed fixed-field farming coupled with herding cattle – a mixed farming mode. The best-known early European farming culture is from Germany along the Middle Danube called Bandkeramik. They also kept sheep, goats, dogs and pigs. These farmers had to work hard to produce a surplus, but did so and became rather wealthy, so much so that as time went by and the Bandkeramik culture spread through Europe they had to create defensive earthworks to protect their stores. They were one of many early Neolithic peoples who interacted and traded with each other (Bogucki & Ryszard 1983) and apparently some of the interactions were hostile. Not only were stores of crops vulnerable, but the Bandkeramik people kept large numbers of cattle and other livestock, which are especially vulnerable to theft, since they can more easily be driven away than stealing large stores of grain or legumes, which would have to be transported.
As Bandkeramik groups migrated they searched for loess soils amenable to the use of hand-held hoes (Howell 1987). Wherever they settled, they established villages with nearby fenced plots, which they maintained by fertilizing with cattle dung and domestic waste. Fixed farms and sedentary residence lent itself to the development of inheritance from one generation to the next. By adopting the sedentary fixed-field mode, these early farmers sowed the seeds of segmentation and hierarchy. In the midst of an egalitarian culture, some family farms would naturally be advantaged, while others would have bad harvests. This had to have put pressure on generalized reciprocity, which can more easily be practiced in a foraging context.
The Bandkeramik culture was a new farming society that was producing food at the household level, but with cooperation between various descent groups within the settlement. They cooperated to build houses, erect enclosures and guard cattle (Thomas 1987). In this kin-based society there was a complex network of social relations that was developed to control productivity. Kin units were becoming self-centered, while overall cultural values still lauded sharing between kin groups. The new economic way of life, however, was straining old communitarian values.
The Bandkeramik are especially important to my theory of the rise of aggrandizement in storaging societies in that this corporate kinship structure that developed in the fixed-field farming context was a springboard for the rise of individualism, as we shall see below.
Corporation is evidenced in the archaeology of the Bandkeramik because about 6,500 B.P. these Neolithic farmers began burying their dead within graves in distinct kin units, indicating a notion of linearity consistent with the fact that their residences were longhouses (Hodder 1990).
By about 4,800 B.P. another change in burial customs took place in the Bandkeramik of Central and Eastern Europe. There we see, for the first time, individual burials. This would seem to indicate that the previous group-based ethos was being replaced by new beliefs that were beginning to applaud individual achievement, power and prestige (Shennan 1993). Brian Fagan (1995:273) writes:
By being buried separately, in a burial adorned with elaborate grave furniture, a prominent elder could take on the role of sole male ancestor, the fountain of authority over land ownership, a role now assumed by his successor. Inheritance of land and wealth was now legitimized.
These elaborate grave goods also honored men who acted in life as warriors. They included weapons such as daggers, swords, battle axes, as well as fine copper ornaments and drinking cups. Clearly, personal achievement was now associated with aggressive males who were likely involved in expanding trade, defending villages and perhaps aggressive warfare. Luxury artifacts obtained by trade or war were becoming symbols of power and prestige.
Personal achievement was given a further boost with the development of plow agriculture (Sherratt 1981). Around 4,600 B.P. the widespread use of the plow enabled production to go forward with fewer fieldworkers, releasing aggrandizers from the task of manual labor and freeing them to pursue power, prestige and property through control of trade, the assemblage of power structures and the domination of other people’s labor. So in place of the dominance of corporate kin groups there arose a new social order in which individual success, prestige and the inheritance of land had become the ideal norm. The twin technologies of the plow and storage bin were working against personal freedoms.
We see an evolutionary trajectory from communitarianism to corporatism to privatism at work in our study of prehistory and history. Even in early farming societies of the Neolithic, groups were still basically egalitarian, with the family as the basic productive unit forming the center of a web of intricate ties and reciprocal social relations that united people, often around an ancestor cult (Champion et. al. 1984), but the seeds of new political institutions were being sown at the same time early Neolithic farmers were sowing their first emmer, barley and flax.
In Europe giant stone structures called megaliths were being constructed that are a reminder that political developments were afoot in the early Neolithic. These massive stone structures and chambers, Stonehenge in England being the most famous example, took a great deal of organization and direction to construct. Aggrandizers were coming to the fore to construct these symbolic edifices to enhance their power and control or that of their kin units, most likely in the form of supervised periodic rites eulogizing community ownership of the land and worship of communal ancestors.
These efforts were not trivial pursuits. Stonehenge, for example, was initially an ancestral burial ground that required at least 30 thousand worker-hours to complete (Chippindale 2004). But these megaliths were more than shrines to the dead. They were also community focal points supervised by leaders who built and maintained them, presiding at the ceremonies held there. These were gigantic materializations of economic and spiritual power and prestige for those who supervised such worship. They are lasting reminders that early Neolithic leaders were on the rise, using manifestations of power and ritual to coalesce their rule over communities.
A megalith like Stonehenge was a process, not an event. Stonehenge took some 1,500 years to construct under the supervision of a series of leaders. Around 5,100 B.P. it began as a ditch in which the builders placed worked-flint tools and the bones of deer and oxen. The bones were old and had been scrupulously cared for prior to burial. About a hundred years later Stonehenge had regularly-spaced posts that formed an enclosed cremation cemetery. By about 4,600 B.P. the builders abandoned the use of timbers and replaced them with stones, which were worked and reworked through the Bronze Age (ca. 3,800-2,700 B.P.).
Stonehenge and the many other European megaliths were clearly important focal points for élites, some having power symbols carved in the stones e.g., crooks and axes. They reinforced political, economic and ritual power of those who supervised the building and worship at such places.
Some authors have noted that mortuary services held at such monumental manifestations of linkage to the occult world functioned to establish, maintain or increase group solidarity by highlighting real or perceived links between living individuals and important groups and the dead (Rayner 1988). Certain rituals, such as cranial deformation, skull caching and plastering, were likely ways in which certain living individuals felt it advantageous to highlight the lives of specific dead ones (Kuijt 2002:83).
Thus we can think about mortuary rituals as focusing on the community or the individual, but my point is that aggrandizing individuals would have used the community aspect of ritual at monumental sites to elevate themselves in the process of seemingly highlighting the whole community. Communalism would have been a convenient shield behind which they could maneuver themselves into the authoritative limelight.
We see this ethnographically. In my study of ritual in Northern Ghana I observed Sisala household heads officiating at rites, the opening words of which always involved calling out the names of their departed ancestors, each of whom was a household headman before the official reciting of the litany of their names. By doing this the living household headman is implicitly reaffirming his authority and position of importance within the group.
Aggrandizers in ancient times would have understood the value of such rituals in their self-promotion efforts. Aggrandizers would have understood the value of tapping into the emotional power of such rites. As Professor Kuijt (2002:83) says, “such segmentation was limited” and it “occurred within the broader context of an egalitarian ideology.”
Society did not move from egalitarianism to hierarchy overnight. The establishment of institutions of power was a process, one which multiple aggrandizers over generations no doubt had to walk a fine line between the old and the new, which they were trying to institute. Clearly a rational strategy for aggrandizers would have been to become involved in rites that reinforced community values, while at the same time elevating the status of certain key dead individuals to whom they were related and subtly lifting up their own stature in the process.
In my work on ritual in Sisalaland Northern Ghana I found that the authority structure was periodically reinforced as elders presided at sacrificial rituals (Mendonsa 1976; see also: Blanton 1995). An elevated social identity is formed every time an elder presides at a ritual, an act which links him with previous headmen in the group. Acting in a public forum as the headman, the Sisala elder is creating intelligible meaning for the group. Part of that meaning is that the group is unified; the other part of the message is that he is an authoritative leader. Ritual creates a political rationale for his actions as a leader of the group. As he presides, the Sisala elder is reinforcing a gerontocratic authority structure that dictates that he has certain rights and privileges denied to others in the group, especially women and junior males.
Professor Kuijt (2002:84) notes that for the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Levant mortuary rites in which there was a selective practice of cranial deformation, the plastering of the skulls of certain selected individuals and the caching of plastered skulls in groups – all signifying the presence of social differentiation. Furthermore, there was a gradual appearance of personal adornment in select graves. This is straightforward evidence of the decline in group solidarity and the rise of corporatism, most likely in the form of lineages or descent groups, each with their respective leadership. It is also likely, as Professor Kuijt points out, that there could have existed a body of ritual specialists presiding over such rites. Such cults are common in the ethnographic record.
These publically-witnessed rites would have involved the initial funeral of the deceased. Later, the grave was re-opened and the skull removed. The skull-less body was then re-buried and more rites centered around the cleaning and plastering of the skull. The skull then underwent a secondary burial in a separate place. In presiding at such rites, the individual or individuals supervising would have been emphasizing the linkage between the living and the dead, but also the authority structure among the living. Such ritual specialists were involved in creating and reinforcing a standardized memory, a linkage between a collective of ancestors and the remaining social group.
In my experience in studying the ancestor cult and associated rites in Sisalaland Northern Ghana, not all ancestors are remembered at such rites. Only the names of prominent senior Sisala, mostly male headmen, are addressed in the rites. Subtly then, the rites are both reaffirming the solidarity of the group and highlighting the gerontocratic authority structure. Clearly in the Sisala case, ritual and political authority cannot be separated and they are co-embedded in the minds of the ritual community. No doubt, the same would have obtained in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Levant rites. In both cases, mortuary rites link the living and the dead in a single community, with the Sisala materializing this connection with ancestor shrines and a communal grave in the family courtyard; and the Levantine folk with processed skulls of selected ancestors.
In the Sisala case, the important dead ancestors are remembered at each rite by addressing them by name. In the Levantine case, the process was twofold: firstly some skulls were collected to be cached; secondly, from that cache ritual specialists took some skulls to have skull-masks created (Kuijt 2002:86). In both cases, in the world of the dead, some individuals were clearly more important than others. The somewhat understated message in both cases is that the world of the living should reflect the social organization in the world of the dead, as both are part of a larger social unit.
Performing rituals entails knowledge of how to contact the ancestors, the right to call the public together for ritual purposes, as well as supervising and shaping the content of the ritual – for example, in Sisalaland who to mention and who to leave out of the litany of ancestral names. In the ancient Levant, presumably it was the ritual elder deciding which skulls to cache and which to provide with further attention. For those selected skulls the procedure was rather elaborate e.g., the creation of a naturalistic face, including all the features of a normal face. In both the Sisala and Levantine cases, as the presiding authority, the elder in charge was mediating the relationship between the living and the dead, which in and of itself has a powerful emotional impact on participants and bystanders.
In Sisalaland traditionally the dead body was buried in a communal grave in the family courtyard and ancestor shrines were also situated within the courtyard. Modernization has altered the burial practices in a very few cases. The fact that big men, chiefs and other notable individuals are now being buried alone is cemented graves with decorations on the cement as well as writing indicates that a process of individualizing is in process in Sisalaland, largely due to colonial contact, the rise of Ghanaian nationalism and the penetration of the area by the market economy.
In the Levantine case, the caching of selected ancestral skulls in extramural locations would seem to indicate the creation of a ritual focal point, a materialization of the ancestor cult, outside the family dwelling. As time passed, these skulls had added to them votive objects – human figurines and faunal remains. One interpretation of such a materialized skull cache is that it was a political center, holding the processed skulls of prominent leaders, a symbolic focal point for living political leaders.
The entire meaning of such ritualistic activities is unclear to archaeologists working in the region, but one interpretation is that the archaeological findings coincide with what is transpiring in Sisalaland i.e., that changes in burial practices represent changes that are occurring in society. Professor Millaire (2004) also found that the manipulation of human remains in ancient Moche society in Peru was based on the belief that such ritual processing of dead bodies was a way of changing destiny. This would seem to indicate that such mortuary skeletal manipulation by ritual specialists was common cross-culturally, with ritual activities having social meaning and implications for social change.
For example,there have always been big men in Sisalaland, perhaps even great men who could conceivably be called little chiefs, but traditionally they were always buried in the family tomb beneath the courtyard of their lineage of birth. No manipulation of the ancestral skeleton was involved, nor was their bigness marked by a different burial, but their funeral would be longer, three days being normal for an average man, while big men might have a funeral that would go on for twelve days. Furthermore, the names of such men would automatically go into the genealogical lexicon to be recited at every ritual by the man’s community.
It does not seem a stretch of the imagination to assume that the changes afoot in the ancient Levant also reflected social changes. With the advent of a storaging economy, it seems that aggrandizing leaders were emerging and that archaeologists can see this in the changes in burial practices. It is an interpretation not at odds with the data from Sisalaland and other ethnographic examples too numerous to cite, but for a good number of them see the bibliography in Sir Jack Goody’s classic, Death, Property and Ancestors (1962).
It seems clear that within these early Levantine communities there existed a nascent form of governance associated with mortuary rituals. Another interesting aspect of the archaeological data is that mortuary practices are very uniform in multiple Levantine communities of that time. Kuijt (2002:87) speculates that this may represent some form of regional cult, perhaps even regional governance of some sort. Further research may provide more insight into this, but for our purposes here what we see is certainly the emergence of ritual institutions that indicate the move away from an egalitarian state to one that is socially differentiated. It would appear, at the very least, that corporatism was on the rise, with family groups developing headmen with special ritual knowledge within the context of an ancestor cult.
We will pursue the impact of domestication in more detail in the next chapter.
The Question of Warfare
After several groundbreaking ethnographies on hunter-gatherers and the development of general hypotheses about their lifestyle, there was the expected reaction by nay saying anthropologists who questioned the general perspective developed by the ethnographers who did the fieldwork e.g., the 1978 Ethnology article by Carol Ember. She made some questionable claims that do not concern us here, but the one that does is here contention that hunter-gatherers were not ‘typically peaceful.” Modern-day hunter-gatherers are not entirely peaceful and, as archaeologists tell us, neither were those of the Paleolithic, but by comparison to the warfare that developed after the Agricultural Revolution, they were very peaceful.
It is my contention that once a surplus generated stratification in post-Paleolithic societies, whether sedentary foraging, agricultural or pastoralist societies, aggrandizers fabricated rules and ideas that favored militarism. Earlier non-sedentary foragers of the long Paleolithic may have had violent individuals and may have periodically retaliated against a neighboring band in small-scale skirmishes, but violence was limited to makeshift conflicts, murder of individuals or capital punishment. The idea of organized, enduring feud had not arrived in the Paleolithic. As Kelly states:
The transition from capital punishment to feud or war – that is, the transition that encapsulates the origin of war – is thus contingent upon the development of the companion concepts of injury to the group and group liability that provides grounds for generalized, reciprocating collective violence that takes the form of raid and counter-raid (2000:43).
It was when a society found itself in the presence of strategic economic stimuli (e.g., land, prime fishing holes, etc) that opportunists formulated ways of arming their fellows to, perhaps in the first instance, defend their resources; and then to move from defensive warfare to offensive combat. Strategic economic stimuli created surplus wealth and this stimulated the desire on the part of aggrandizers to formulate rules and roles, political and religious that gave them the power to control their surplus and to go after the stored wealth of others. This was usually done by emerging politicos, but they also may have acted in concert with shamans or nascent priests, as we will see in the case of the Yokut-Mono Amerindians of California (chapter 3), where little chiefs and shamans collaborated to extract surplus value from their fellow sedentary foragers. This is a diminutive example of what is commonly known to historians as the palace-temple complex e.g., that of Pi-Ramesse of the Pharaoh Ramesses II (3279-3213 B.P.) that housed within its walls royal palaces, the high court, military barracks and temples, all the architecture of power. Also, there was a giant statue of the enthroned Pharaoh and wall painting depicting victories in war (Tyldesley 2000). All those materializations of statecraft were centuries away from the simplicity of life in the Paleolithic.
Kelly (2000: chapter 2) notes that the development of segmentation is a key causal variable in the emergence of war. It is lacking in most of Fabbro’s sample of peaceful societies and present in most warlike societies (1978). Segmentation of a group is also at least a covariant of the rise of élites and inequality in my view. It is, therefore, important that we understand what an unsegmented society is and how it differs from a segmented one.
Unsegmented societies have a minimum degree of elaboration of social groups; while segmented societies are internally segmented e.g., into lineages, moieties or clans. No level of organization beyond the local community is found in unsegmented groups; while in segmented ones there are levels of organization beyond the local community. Within local groups of unsegmented societies, families are usually identifiable as detachable constituent units; while in segmented societies, within local groups, families are not identifiable as detachable constituent units but are one segment in a larger grouping. In unsegmented societies, nuclear families tend to predominate within the local group; while in unsegmented societies nuclear families are only one form of family organization and corporate extended families are common. In unsegmented societies the culturally recognized coactive groups are limited to the family and local community; while in segmented societies, the culturally recognized coactive groups found are not limited to the family and local community. In unsegmented societies there are no units that are equivalent in structure and function; while in segmented societies segments are units that are equivalent in structure and function. In unsegmented society there is no segmental organization and no segmental hierarchy; while in segmented societies there is both segmental organization and segmental hierarchy and segmental organization is a combination of like segments into progressively more inclusive groups within a segmentary hierarchy. Unsegmented groups show no corporations of any sort; while corporations are a common feature of segmented societies e.g., lineages and clans. Unsegmented societies lack social substitutability and there is no wergild; while social substitutability is a feature of corporate groups (or sodalities) in segmented societies and the wergild may be found. Unsegmented societies lack descent groups, but may have egocentric bilateral kin networks or kindreds; while segmented societies have descent groups. In unsegmented societies there is no rule-bound marital exchange between set groups; while rule-bound marital exchange between set groups is common in segmented societies. In marriage in unsegmented societies, there is no significant transfer of valuables, though brideservice may exist; however in segmented societies both exist. In the Atlas of World Cultures (Murdock 1981) there are only 32 of 563 societies (5.68%) that are unsegmented; while there are 551 segmented societies (94.32%).
The significance of the vast difference between the percentage of unsegmented and segmented societies is that in Fabbro’s (1978) study of peaceful societies he found that unsegmented societies tended to be peaceful, with only two instances of segmented societies showing peaceful characteristics.
There is further empirical confirmation of the thesis that segmentation and social substitutability are key factors causing warlike attitudes in a society. Ross (1983) sampled the ethnographic data on 90 societies, of which 25 were foragers, as defined by them having less than 25% of their sustenance derived from domesticated plants or animals. Of these 25 foraging groups, 8 were of the unsegmented type and 17 did not conform to this organizational type, that is, they had instances of social substitutability and/or some degree of segmentation. His data show a very strong association between the low frequency of warfare and the unsegmented organizational type. In other words, warless societies lacked the organizational features associated with segmentation and social substitutability, those attributes that are conducive to the development of group concept e.g., us vs. them.
We can safely assume that hominids and early human hunter-gatherers were unsegmented and that, for some reason, segmentation occurred after a very long period of time, and rather abruptly. It occurred in farming communities, pastoralists and among sedentary foragers e.g., the Northwest Coast Amerindians and the Calusa of Florida, but segmentation proliferated once animals and plants were domesticated. In both of these cases, sedentary foragers and domesticators, the common variable was the presence of strategic resources that produced a storable-stealable-surplus. Once this situation obtained, aggrandizers moved to secure the surplus and did so by building institutions of authority e.g., chiefdoms and priesthoods.
Again, Ericksen & Horton (1992) provide cross-cultural data that shows that unsegmented societies uniformly do not have the cultural concept of group liability or institutions such as the wergild, where vengeance is taken out on any member of the offender’s (e.g., one who has killed a member of their kin group) kin group. That is, social substitutability is lacking in unsegmented societies in their data set. They also found that the absence of kin group responsibility in hunter-gatherer societies made it seven times more likely in those societies that individual self-redress would be used than in other types of societies e.g., farmers or herders (1992:73-74). Also, those foragers that had some segmentation tended to have the concept of group responsibility and the practice of blood feud. Unsegmented societies lack the defining characteristics of the blood feud and certainly do not have organized warfare, with the intent of dominating another society, seeking land, labor or prestige (Wright 1942:560-561).
Warfare is rare to nonexistent within and between unsegmented foraging non-storing societies inhabiting environments characterized by low resource density, diversity and predictability at densities below 0.2 persons per square mile (Kelly2000:133). Furthermore, spontaneous disputes over access to resources occur both within and between unsegmented foraging societies in environments that are rich in naturally occurring subsistence resources, those that are characterized by high resource density, diversity and reliability. They also occur in environments that support population densities in excess of 0.2 persons per square mile. The frequency and severity of clashes is augmented by higher population densities and/or environmental circumscription (cf. Carneiro 1988).
All the data I have referenced indicate that pre-planned group efforts to exact vengeance are and were rare to non-existent in unsegmented foraging societies. Once a society, even a hunter-gathering one, develops segmentation the concept of social substitutability emerges and we see members participating in institutionalized blood feud.
What is significant for my theory is that pre-planned collective efforts to raid an enemy require some degree of leadership and preparation. It is a time for opportunists to shine and as history shows, feud is not a dead end street. Warfare developed next and this provided alpha males an opportunity to take leadership roles, which usually did not stop there, as go-getters have, throughout history, found ways to translate military success into political authority. Blood feud was a stepping stone for aggrandizers who aspired to be grandees, which of course is a cognate word, both coming from the Latin adgrandir – to increase, as in increasing one’s power or status. Logically, such go-getters began to engage in warfare, the building of political institutions, often in conjunction with religious ones and also fabricated the idea of male superiority, which in time led to patriarchy. These ideas, activities and institutions are related to militarism.
In my own fieldwork in Ghana among the Sisala people I saw how segmentation works, both to create conflicts and to resolve them, but the process took leadership (Mendonsa 1982; 2000; 2001; 2003). Let's look at one case to illustrate this point. The western Sisala where I did my fieldwork are a patrilineal people with clans, which are divided into lineages, several of which make up a village. My village of Bujan was segmented into nine patrilineages divided into two moieties, with three lineages on the Fokorniaa side (descendants of Fokor) and six on the side called Fuoniaa (descendants of Fuo). The principle lineage in the Fokorniaa was Fokorjang; while the senior lineage in the other moiety was Fuojang. Lineages were the only corporate groups farming together and sharing food. Moieties were nominal units only, with no corporate functions, though Fuoniaa moiety was said to be the “elder brother” of Fokorniaa moiety. I suspect that the first settlers of Fokorniaa came late to the village and could have even been strangers, though they may have been clan members. In any case, they were considered clansmen and junior kin to the members of Fuoniaa.
Bujan was one of several villages comprising the Crocodile clan, an exogamous unit. It was not a economically corporate unit, but did have a clan ritual leader, an earth priest, who periodically presided over ancestral sacrifices thought to benefit the whole clan. It was forbidden to have sex with or marry any classificatory “sister” or “mother” within the clan. This meant that a young man would have to travel miles to find a legitimate lover. Many made the trip, especially on market days in distant clans.
I knew of only one case where it was known that there was an ongoing sexual relationship between a “brother” and a “sister” from our village, each coming from opposite moieties. No one was able to stop the tryst and people said that it would one day cause the village trouble.
But that was a rarity. Most illicit love affairs in the village were between young men and wives of their “brothers” and sometimes their “fathers,” as older husbands married polygamously could have young, attractive wives. This case is about one such affair, which ran against the norm that stated that one never sleeps with the wife of a kinsman, unless he dies and the wife is inherited and taken as a wife by the surviving brother.
I will call the couple involved by the fictitious names of Halu, a female; and Batong, the male in question. Halu, a young wife in her twenties, was married to a man in the moiety of Fuoniaa and Batong, a young unmarried man, was of the Fokorniaa moiety.
One morning while I was still in my hut I heard shouting and went outside to see young men armed with spears, hoes and axes threatening each other in the “no-man’s-land” that separated Fuoniaa from Fokorniaa. There was much shouting involved. My hut was next to that of the clan earth priest in Fuoniaa moiety and he, a very old man, came out after me. He surveyed the situation and quickly dispatched a small boy on an errand. The boy disappeared into the maze Fuoniaa compounds.
About the same time there were deafening screams coming from one of the lineage compounds in Fuoniaa and I later learned that the offended husband and his brothers were beating Halu for having slipped out of the compound during the night to sleep with Batong. This was not an illegal act, according to clan law, but a foolish one, for every night the main gate of each lineage is “locked” by placing a long piece of elephant grass across the opening. This is a signal for lineage members to remain inside, for outside there were thought to be witches and there surely were deadly snakes. Most people stayed inside.
I found out that the husband had gone to Halu’s room during the night and found her absent. He did not know where she had gone and, at first, he thought that perhaps she had merely gone to defecate in the bush. When she did not return he called his brothers and they waited for her at the lineage gate. When she tried to sneak back in just before daybreak they jumped her and beat her with their fists. One old man hit her repeatedly with his walking stick, but, being blind, he wasn’t very accurate and later one of the men told me that he hit them more than the transgressing wife. It was a story that got amplified with the telling and became a source of merriment around village fires.
I was torn between observing the young men in the open space, who I thought would soon come to blows; and going over to the sounds of a screaming woman. I stayed next to the earth priest because I figured that was where the anthropological interest would lie. I was not disappointed.
Shortly the little boy returned to the side of the earth priest with another old man in tow. I knew this man to be the “eldest elder” of Bujan. This is a formal office and he is often called upon to settle disputes and is one of the presiding elders at ancestral sacrifices. He and the clan’s earth priest conferred briefly and then they sent the boy off again. This time he returned rather quickly with a tin plate full of cool ash from a died out fire. The earth priest took the plate of ash and, with the other old man, ambled toward the combatants, although the young men were doing nothing more than shouting insults at each other.
Let it be said that this was no small matter to the earth priest and the senior man of Bujan. According to Sisala lore, to spill the blood of a clansman, or to have sex with a clanswoman, would anger the clan ancestors to the point that they would cause all sorts of misfortune to befall the clan e.g., crops would fail, women would miscarry, people would become ill and others would die.
The two old men hurried as fast as their frail legs would take them to the scene of the confrontation, where the Fuoniaa chaps were facing the young men of Fokorniaa, all brandishing weapons that could cause blood to spill upon the earth, thus insuring a catastrophe for the clan.
This was a conflict between two segments of the segmentary lineage system (Smith 1956; Sahlins 1961). It is what social anthropologists call “structural conflict,” where one segment feels wronged by another and feels the need to retaliate. In this case the Fokornia boys came out and shouted first at the still sleepy Fuoniaa boys to “come out and fight! Those attacked, the Fuoniaa boys, felt the responsibility to defend the honor of their segment, their moiety. In an unsegmented society, the husband would probably have gone over and beat up or killed Batong. In this segmented case, it was a group affair.
If the segmentation caused the ruckus; it also resolved it without bloodshed. The two groups of shouting youth stood face-to-face, about ten feet apart. The earth priest and the senior elder of Bujan placed themselves in between the shouting men, who totaled about twenty, with a few more on the Fokorniaa side. When the earth priest spoke, the combatants fell silent. He admonished them to stop before blood was spilt on clan ground and he went into some detail about the consequences of such an event. The confrontation turned into a classroom.
Then the senior elder of the village spoke and, in Sisala fashion, repeated most of what the earth priest had already said. While he was speaking, the earth priest took the plate of ash and dribbled a white line on the earth separating the two sides of potential combatants. When he was done, he again spoke, this time at some length. The young men were silent, but fidgety. The earth priest noted that they could not cross that line of white, cool ash from the once hot fire. It was a metaphor and a ritual symbol, the kind for which every ethnographer waits. He explained that if they crossed the line of ash, the clan ancestors would kill them. He was pulling rank on them. He made this point repeatedly, which was great for note taking: “As this ash was once part of a raging fire; it is now cool. Your fires are raging in your hearts, but they too, like the ash, must be cool.”
Hot and cold are Sisala symbols that all present immediately understood. The illicit affair was a hot thing, but the spilling of clan blood would be even hotter. A hot thing does not make a hot thing right. Only a cool thing does that. That was the logic. Breaking clan rules makes things hot. Becoming angry over such a delict also creates unwanted heat. Hot things make the ancestors angry and they will rain misfortune on the clansmen if the hot things are not cooled. This was the council of the elders, who by this time had been joined by all the senior men in the village.
After the sermons, which bored the young warriors, as sermons are want to do, they dispersed, grumbling their way back to their respective moieties, bowing to the higher authority of the elders and the unseen supernatural power of the ancestors. Of course, several sacrifices had to be made by the senior men of the Fokorniaa to placate the ancestors of the clan, so as not to cause any more trouble. All was smoothed over until the next group conflict produced by the nature of their segmentary social structure. It was a group vs. group affair but had the segmentation been absent, as in a band of hunter-gatherers for example, most likely it would have been a conflict between individuals, not segments of kin groups. Unsegmented societies that existed before the emergence of segmented sedentary societies in the Neolithic tended to act out their hostility in one-on-one confrontations or in small raids, as is the habit of contemporary hunter-gatherers (Dickson 1990:166).
In the early years of the Neolithic, segmentation was a bedfellow of hierarchy. Both can be said to be a cause of warfare, since it is difficult to interlock two or more separate hierarchies without some conflict. When a storable, stealable surplus stimulated the rise of élites and ranks in society, leaders needed to defend the surplus of several segments e.g., lineages within a village. Obviously, defense was easier and more efficient if the segments were united under village leadership, hence the rise of chiefs to deal with such matters.
Knauft (1990) reports that foragers typically have an ethos stressing non-competitive approaches to inter-personal and inter-group relations and a low frequency of social aggression, as well as a low valuation of aggressive behavior. Violence in history tended to increase with the development of a surplus of food that could be stored, in granaries for agriculturalists or in herds for pastoralists. This became what I term a storable-stealable-surplus and necessitated centralized control, militarization and led to violence in raids and defensive measures to protect community wealth that far exceeded the skirmishes that occasionally occurred in the egalitarian foraging world of the Paleolithic.
But it is not foraging lifestyle that prevents massive warfare so much as their tendency toward egalitarianism. Kelly (2007) notes that violence is more common in non-egalitarian societies than in egalitarian ones. For example, in complex sedentary foragers, violence may be culturally acceptable and may frequently occur between individuals in competition for prestige. My contention is, however, that behind the demise of an egalitarian ethos there was a material cause – the presence of a storable, stealable surplus.
Therefore, warfare had “its roots in the demographic and economic changes of the Neolithic Revolution” (Haas 2001:329). No doubt with the need to store and control early storage bins of grain and other food crops early politicos would have organized locals to defend them, most likely on a volunteer basis i.e., there were, as yet, no standing armies. Yet as early as ancient Sumer (ca. 7,300 B.P.) there were armies composed of full-time soldiers who did not disband during times of peace. With the passage of time these professional soldiers became better trained and equipped than army reserves and volunteers, adding to the power of the state.
Grain storage was at the heart of this military buildup. During Sumer’s Ubaid 1 Period (ca. 7,300–6,700 B.P.), in the extreme southern portion of present-day Iraq, on what was then the shores of the Persian Gulf, people began to experiment with grain production. Settlers established permanent colonies there, pioneering the growing of grains in arid conditions. Their success led to what I call a storable-stealable-surplus. Once the Sumerians had permanent settlements and stores of grain, they had a problem that would face almost all farmers who developed beyond subsistence farming. That was the fact that while they had grain, there were others who did not. Their precious stores of grain were “stealable” or open to theft. As such they needed protection and militancy on the part of the producers, in the form of a reserve army, was the first response to such a threat, but once the state grew larger and more powerful, a standing army was in order.
Complexity was need-driven. Armies grew out of the same collective efforts that went into the digging of irrigation canals to succor the crops of these early Sumerian planters. It was another form of centralized coordination of labor. We know that a central government had arisen in Ubaid Sumer because their large villages had the first temples of public architecture in Mesopotamia. Their settlements show lower-ranked houses surrounding a temple-government complex of higher-ranked houses, indicating the emergence of social stratification. Ranked grave goods also show signs of a hierarchical society, indicators of decreasing egalitarianism. Peter Bogucki (1990) calls this transition the “trans-egalitarian” period, wherein households competed for resources with some winners and some losers. In other words, this became a time of upward social mobility, with élites moving up, leaving commoners behind. This was the nascent rise of an élite class of hereditary chiefs. Perhaps they were kin group headmen who were linked to the administration of the temple, its shrines and granaries, since at this time, stored grain not only fell under military protection but also that of the shamans and priests. Most likely, heads of state were responsible for mediating conflicts within the community and also protecting it from attacks by outsiders.
Thorkild Jacobsen (1978) and other Sumerian scholars believe that this culture saw for the first time the rise of a ranked society with rural peasants and lower stratum townsmen being lorded over by a centralized élite cadre residing in the town’s temple complex. The rise of this aristocratic group of politico-religious leaders was stimulated by, among other things, the central need to protect society’s stores of food – the storable-stealable-surplus on which their existence depended. Protecting this storehouse by mystical means was part of their self-defined civic duty.
Roper (1975) indicates that war also increased with the growth of trade and efforts to control strategic sites along trade routes. In a more general sense, another important factor in the development of warfare was the evolution of centralized governments and hierarchy (Kelly 2000:1-2).
There is another aspect of war in the Neolithic, one which involves how farmers interacted with foragers. Some believe that as farmers were forced to migrate by demographic pressures, they encountered foragers and the meeting was not peaceful (Keeley 1996). Evidence for this comes from mass graves, arrows embedded in skeletons and village defensive systems of farmers who established themselves in Europe. It appears that there was violent conquest initially and ongoing attacks by non-farmers, either foragers or pastoralists. In any case, the emergence of agriculture likely stimulated warfare because farmers needed land and they used that land to produce a storable surplus, which made them vulnerable to attacks by have-nots. The presence of food stored in early villages made them tempting targets for nomadic bands or rival settlements
Once there were communities with stored wealth, warfare, both defensive and offensive, became a part of the human existence. Politicos found it convenient as a means of shoring up their power to militarize their societies with an eye toward defending their communities against attackers. On the other hand, some use their military forces to attack those communities they felt to be vulnerable. There were roughly two goals in such offensive war: (1) the attackers could sack and burn, taking wealth and slaves; or, (2) they could subjugate the members of the losing community to demand tribute or periodic payments to the conquering leadership. The latter approach was usually consistent with expansive chiefdoms, as in the case of the complex Amerindian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States. By the time of European contact, the area’s political centers were linked in alliance, tributary or conquest relationships (Anderson 1994:74). Arriving Europeans found clusters of communities grouped around distinctive political centers, the smaller communities being subservient to the powerful center.
For example, the Coosa or Cofitachequi had two administrative/decision-making levels consisting of primary chiefs and their immediate followers and lesser tribute-paying chiefs and their retinues. Hernando DeSoto found a three-level settlement ranking system consisting of a major ceremonial/political center surrounded by smaller tribute-paying centers, which in turn were surrounded by tribute-paying villages (Anderson 1994:75). This hierarchical form was also noted by the Pardo Expedition (1566) where élites were seen as having distinctive dress and they were ranked into big chiefs and lesser nobles, the latter supporting the big chief, who in some accounts was called the Great Sun. Decisions were made by a chief in consultation with his Privy Council or principal supporters, comprised of men with inherited positions and also others who had distinguished themselves in warfare.
The Great Sun lived in the center of town, with the dwellings of his nobles arrayed around him, symbolic of central and peripheral authority. This is a common pattern in history (Smout 1980) that has been replicated over the centuries because, having established power, aspiring men strove to shore it up with aggressive war and its spoils. The Great Sun’s residence was set apart from the homes of commoners and served as his abode, but also as a temple, combination house and council room. These were mound-builders and the chief’s complex was often raised on one.
Not only were élite Coosa distinguished from commoners by dress and settlement pattern, they also acted in the service of the Great Sun as warriors, litter bearers, those who would fan him in public appearances, etc. In this openly visible service, nobles demonstrated both their close proximity to central authority and their dependence on it. The politico-religious center was about the business of siphoning off wealth from the periphery and it was paid in both foodstuffs and luxury goods – maize, deerskins, martin skins, bark blankets, feather mantles, trousers, leggings, moccasins, etc. – which were stored in large quantity near the residence of the Great Sun. He also had corncribs throughout his chiefdom filled with maize that was available to him upon demand. This chiefly complex in the middle of town was a redistribution center. Maize stores could be distributed to anyone in need, indeed Spanish armies were supplied with large quantities of food from them, and the Great Sun would also distribute luxury goods and slaves captured in war to his loyal followers. Of course, this was a method of maintaining the support of the key members of society.
The chief was also set apart in death with elaborate mortuary ceremonies, his body laid to rest in specially constructed tombs, also (and symbolically surrounded in death by the noble dead. At these sites elaborate mortuary rites and ancestor veneration were performed. These tombs, as well as temples, shrines and sacred relics were overseen by an organized priesthood and defended, as were other chiefly properties, by a warrior cult. These sacred sites were the “ideological centers of individual polities” (Anderson 1994:80). When warfare broke out, one focus of aggressors was the destruction of an enemy’s sacred places, thought to be especially demoralizing to a people the aggressors wished to conquer.
It was, at that time, an object of warfare to devour a people, disrespect their sacred places and ancestors and bring them into slavery or to their knees as suppliers of tribute. The chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States were is a more or less constant state of war and were separated by buffer zones as a means of warding off attacks. Towns were also fortified and warriors were kept at the ready to defend the stores of the chief. When the Spaniards arrived they were repeatedly facing well organized military units who practiced by hit-and-hide tactics and larger-scale campaigns. Warfare and the pursuit of power and tribute had become a way of life by the time of European arrival.
The Emergence of Complexity
Unlike the Coosa mentioned above, Paleolithic societies were rather simple in that they lacked hereditary offices or complex institutions e.g., voluntary associations, the corvée, gilds, armies, secret societies – the kinds of organizations we see emerging after the Neolithic Revolution. Certainly most of the social complexity did emerge once farming and herding spread throughout human populations; but in rare cases, institutions of domination evolved even before the advent of the domestication of plants and animals. This may have happened in societies, usually hunter-gatherer-fisher societies that predated the Agricultural Revolution, but were able to store some form of wealth.
Storing food was problematic in Paleolithic times and remains so for many hunter-gatherer peoples in the world today. Many hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic must have gone for periods without certain kinds of food that under modern conditions could be stored e.g., meat. This is true even today in certain parts of the world where hunter-gatherers still consider nature a larder and take their food from nature’s storage places as they need them. This is all well and good for fruit, roots, nuts and berries, but nature also stores calories in animals that are not so easily brought to the dinner table. Consequently, when hunters in foraging societies today are able to bring down a large animal they often gorge themselves with meat, since it cannot be kept safely for any significant length of time. Baegert (1863-1864) reported that early Amerindians of California were known to eat 24 pounds of meat in a 24-hour period. The anthropologist Allan Holmberg personally saw Siriono Amerindians of Eastern Bolivia eat 30 pounds of meat in a day (1950:36). Some bands like the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa dry some meat after gorging themselves, but long-term storage was not a main factor in their economy (Marshall 1965:255).
Without storage of foodstuffs, Paleolithic peoples did not develop institutions of inequality, a managerial élite and statecraft. No chiefs arose in non-storing bands of early hunter-gatherers, but they did arise in hunter-gatherer-fisher societies that were able to store large quantities of food e.g., the Northwest Coast Amerindians or the Calusa of Florida. Once stored wealth was possible, it unleashed aggrandizing tendencies and some men strove to elevate themselves as big men and chiefs. Inequality rose so high among the Northwest Coast Amerindians, for example, that they not only had chiefs and social classes, but they also practiced slavery.
In other words, once storage of foodstuffs was possible, some in society began to move to control it and to accumulate more stored goods than others. This was the beginning of inequality and the foundations of a stratified society. Without an economic surplus, men could not easily control food, since they could not monopolize that portion of a group’s food that was not consumed on a daily basis. In non-storaging societies that surplus existed only in nature i.e., the food still available to be picked, dug or killed. It was there to be collected, but any individual in a non-storer hunting and gathering society would be foolish to collect and store it, for it is already stored in nature and is there for the having.
For example, the environment of the Ju/’hoansi of Africa is abundant with foods. By far the most abundant and important of these foodstuffs is the Mongongo nut. The ethnographer Richard Lee (1968:33) notes that tens of thousands of pounds of these nuts are eaten by the Ju/’hoansi each year, yet thousands more rot on the ground. These nuts count for 50 percent of their vegetable diet by weight, but they cannot eat them all.
When Professor Lee asked a Ju/’hoansi man why his people didn’t harvest and store Mongongo nuts, one of the staples of the bands in the Kalahari Desert, the man was perplexed, replying that they were already stored for the having in nature. He went on to emphasize that re-storing them would be stupid, superfluous work. When the Ju/’hoansi need the nuts, they simply walk through the bush and pick them. This natural abundance, as opposed to stored food, prevents a person, however much the individual is a naturally born aggrandizer, from gaining an unequal edge on others by amassing wealth.
This is not to say that the Paleolithic people who lacked visible storage technology did not store, in the sense that they left certain foods in nature’s larder to access later (Ingold 1983). But to say that hunter-gatherers left some foods in nature to be picked at will is very different from storing grains in granaries or calories in herds of animals. Why? Because the former cannot be stolen and hoarded elsewhere by thieves and the latter is a storable, stealable surplus, which automatically presents the need for complex organization to defend the surplus, as well as military excursions to take the surplus of others, should leaders decide to turn their defensive armies into offensive ones and history is replete with examples of men who did just that.
From the archeological record, we know that non-sedentary foragers made and exchanged gifts, an exchange that surely included some element of competition i.e., trying to give more or better gifts than one received, but some sedentary foragers took this to the extreme because they lived in a very lush environment that provided them with a storable form of foodstuffs that, in its stored form, was considered disposable wealth. In essence, to borrow Michael W. Young’s phrase, the Northwest Coast Amerindians were “fighting with food,” though as time passed and they encountered European trade goods they added them into their weaponry.
Transient foragers in the Paleolithic did not “fight with food” or with much of anything else, for that matter. Most lived more or less peacefully with each other within the band and with outsiders they mostly developed cooperative means of exchange and aid. All that was to change with sedentary foragers and even more dramatically with the development of large-scale food production in the Neolithic. Once food could be stored, we get not only peaceful “food fights,” such as the potlatch, but also we witness the rise of both defensive and offensive weaponry and military tactics, as well as walled cities, moats and all sorts of battlements. Yet in both cases – storing hunter-gatherer-fishers and domesticators of plants and animals – the causal variable was the same: the presence of a food surplus.
Below in Box 1.1 we see a comparison of simple foragers vs. complex ones:
BOX 1.1. A COMPARISON OF SIMPLE AND COMPLEX FORAGERS
(after Kelly 2007:294)
SIMPLE COMPLEX
Environment Unpredictable or variable Predictable or less variable
Diet Terrestrial game & plants Marine foods plus
terrestrial game & plants
Settlement size Small Large
Residential mobility High Low
Demography Low population density
relative to food High population density
relative to food
Food storage Little to no dependence Medium to high
dependence
Social organization No corporate groups Corporate groups (descent
groups)
Political organization Egalitarian Hierarchal: Classes based
on wealth or descent
Economy Extensive Intensified
Occupational
specialization Only for older persons Common
Territoriality Loose sense of boundaries Strong sense of need for
perimeter defense
Warfare Rare (ad hoc skirmishes) Common (organized war
parties)
Inequality Low to absent High
Slavery Absent Frequent
Ethic of competition Suppressed; not tolerated Encouraged
Resource ownership Diffuse (group use) Tightly controlled (private
property)
Exchange Generalized reciprocity Wealth objects;
Competitive feasts
Leadership Ad hoc Permanent & hereditary
Means of production Available to all Limited to owners
Expropriation of
labor None By chiefs & members of
upper class
Generally speaking, anthropologists feel that the causal variables behind the rise of complexity and inequality among sedentary storing foragers were a combination of resource abundance, population pressure, intensification of production, storage of foodstuffs (wealth) and the expropriation of labor.
The important point to be taken from this comparison between storers and non-storers is that it was not a mode of production that led to inequality and the development of political leadership and statecraft, but it was the presence of a storable, stealable surplus. It was not farming or herding that did it, though they helped spread inequality, political leadership and statecraft beyond limited econiches – it was the simple fact that once there was stored wealth men began to organize their group to defend it and they used it, and the control of it, to elevate themselves to high offices. It also brought about actual production in the sense that society could be organized to produce wealth using an existing means of production. In the case of the Tlingit of the Northwest Coast of America, the means of production was key fishing spots. For the Chumash of Southern California it was seagoing canoes used to fish and transport trade goods. With such means of production under their control, some men were able to establish themselves as political leaders – chiefs and chiefly families became wealthy, ruling families with hereditary privileges not available to the commoners of their societies. Stratification arrived in these non-farming, non-herding societies but it was very circumscribed and limited to small econiches. The domestication of plants and animals in the Neolithic allowed complexity, inequality, a managerial élite, statecraft, private property and stratification to spread over the globe and become a way of life for all but a handful of human beings in our modern world.
These cases of foragers with stores of wealth are highly instructive because they show that it wasn’t farming or herding, per se, which caused this transformation. It was the development of a storable-stealable-surplus. Before agriculture or stockbreeding, complexity arose in those few foraging societies that lived in environments that had something that could be rationally and efficiently hoarded e.g., dried fish. It became stored wealth.
Once humans had stored wealth, social institutions were developed by opportunists to protect and control that wealth. Archaeology has shown these areas to be on the Northwest Coast of America, the Northwest Plateau, coastal Florida, the New Guinea Highlands, the Ohio Valley and coastal Peru. No doubt there were others that archaeologists have not yet discovered.
There are different meanings to the term complexity. Jeanne Arnold defines it as having the following two components:
1) Leadership and status are strictly inherited.
2) Leaders have substantial renewable control over the labor of numerous non-kin.
She is talking about hierarchy and about leadership beyond kin group headmanship. This is certainly an important evolutionary development, but one could also consider the rise of hereditary headmanship in kin groups to be more complex than anything in generalized foraging society.
Being a headman of a Neolithic kin group was the first poleconomic office, with someone designated as the controller of wealth and labor. Logically village chiefs would have emerged to stand at the head of a village council of headmen – the “biggest” headman – and then, later on, regional chiefs would unite villages creating larger chiefdoms. But a lineage headman was a degree of complexity beyond anything found in the Paleolithic.
There is some hair-splitting going on here. Many see collectivities or corporate groups as preliminary to complexity. I see a continuum from headmanship on to state offices (see Box 1.2). Early complexity was a result, primarily, of the ability of go-getters to capitalize on the ability to accumulate surpluses. Initially, this occurred under the auspices of the corporate kin group, so the very first emergence of hierarchy was within kin groups, a phenomenon that later spread as domestication intruded on “long sequences of hunter-gatherer cultural evolution.”
Later I will elaborate on the concept of corporate, as in the above-mentioned corporate kin group. Here let me just say that corporateness is a significant degree of complexity over anything in the Paleolithic. A corporate group stands as a legal entity above and beyond its constituent members. We see this in an institution like the wergild that was common in the Neolithic Era. Wergild was a “harm-payment” in old Germanic law, the compensation paid from one kin group to another in the case of injury or death perpetrated by the member of one group against another. In some cases another member of the killer’s group might be sacrificed to compensate for the loss of a member of the offended group. Such “corporate” customs are common among many tribal peoples.
Of course, we see corporateness in marriage payments between kin groups as well, where elaborate means are instituted to symbolize that the matrimonial linkage is between two corporate groups, not a marriage of individuals. Furthermore, we see that in some cases the death of a wife who was exchanged from one patrilineal kin group to another may require the wife’s corporate group to supply a second wife to replace the loss to the husband’s group (an institution called the sororate). The levirate is another example (marriage with a deceased husband’s brother). More on the importance of corporations later.
As people migrated out of Africa and moved over the globe, those who had spread into less lush environments may have skipped the complex hunting-gathering stage and gone from forager to farmer/pastoralist directly. In fact, most groups slowly did discover domestication. Some storaging foragers may have eventually become farmers; while others like the Calusa of south Florida resisted farming, even looking down on it as less than honorable. Looked at in retrospect, we can see a generalized pattern that looks something like the sequence in Box 1.2:
Box 1.2. Political Evolution through History
Leader Polity Evolutionary Direction
Headman Family group Then
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
Now
Big man/
Little chief Village/chiefdom
Authoritative
chief Village
Paramount
chief Region
King Kingdom
Emperor Hegemony over
Several Kings
President/
Prime
Minister
Nation-State
But there was no lineal necessity, no teleology, in evolution. There was no fixed path. From time to time, some farmers reverted to being foragers and even in tribal farmers today, foraging makes up a part of their economic behavior. And foragers who knew of farming could ignore such productive techniques. Jeanne Arnold says:
The Chumash, for instance, were aware of agricultural practices late in prehistory through their limited exchange contacts with the Mohave of the California desert, but they never adopted farming throughout their long and apparently in situ development of up to 12,000 years. This extraordinary longevity has its parallels in the Northwest Coast and Plateau, where in situ development spans at least 6,000 years in some areas and was never cut short by a new subsistence regime (2001:4-5).
Complex hunter-gatherers created many useful adaptive technologies and survival techniques, but the appearance of a storable-stealable-surplus also had some less desirable effects e.g., the escalation of armed conflict and the impoverishment of some in society. In other words, once wealth could be stored – domination followed – both domination of surrounding folks and domination of workers within a social group.
Selfishness and domination emerge in all kinds of storaging societies. Whatever the social structure, if there is storable wealth, aggrandizers will engage in strategic and accumulative behavior, some in support of the commonweal; but some men perform activities that may undermine the general good. Politics may have included both kinds of behavior in almost every emerging political hegemony. In every type of society with a storable, stealable surplus, super-achievers will construct scripts and discourses to elevate themselves and subjugate others, giving themselves privileged access to labor value and other resources. Thus, domination is a constructed and scripted effort.
I have said that aggrandizers are builders of rule sets or institutions. Once these agglomerations of codes, roles and customs became institutionalized they took on mass and jelled into well-known and accepted ways of doing things. As such, they functioned to benefit the creators, the central figures in the institutional complexes – headmen, chiefs, kings and so forth. But they also attracted other self-starters, who saw opportunity in attaching themselves to the ongoing structure (generals, courtiers and viziers for example).
Once set in motion, institutional formations took on a life of their own. Fanned by the fuel of opportunity, by the lure of more prestige, power and property, institutions tended to get bigger and stronger. Initially, they did so by the driving force of a charismatic leader, like the already-mentioned Greek basileus Odysseus twenty-eight centuries ago; or they may have come about through the combined energies of a ruling council of headmen that moved the new poleconomy forward.
Domination was a constructed and scripted effort, but almost never by a single aggrandizer. A rising star needed supporters and some of those are closer to the star than others and we see them as his ruling council, priesthood, army, courtiers or simply his faction. As go-getters surrounding the grand aggrandizer, they participated in the formation and manipulation of the doctrine of rule, which they helped fashion in a way that especially benefited them. In other words, engineering domination was usually a small group effort. In this way, a ruling cohort arose in the early societies of the Neolithic.
Heterarchy vs. Hierarchy
It is likely that early Neolithic communities were a mix of egalitarianism and emerging inequality. Stratification did not show up overnight or fully developed. Societies did not immediately become hierarchical in a full sense. More probable is a blend of heterarchy and hierarchy. While hierarchy is ranking on a vertical axis, heterarchy is more complex, involving various forms of organization splayed out horizontally. Carole Crumley says heterarchy is “the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways.” In other words, within Neolithic societies there were likely pockets of egalitarian structuring and ranked structuring.
Inequality most probably began in non-stratified ways i.e., unconnected with control of property, but merely as an accumulation of prestige through demonstration of community values e.g., big man feasts as a show of sharing or reciprocal-giving behavior. There could have arisen ritual, kinship and associational domains within which aggrandizers could pursue prestige and, with time, prestige became institutionalized in hereditary positions e.g., the big man becomes a chief or a person good at going into trance becomes formalized as a shaman.
It is likely that in the Neolithic, as now in modern tribal communities, most societies were a mix of some egalitarian structures and some hierarchical ones. Moreover, inequality could have been formed, lost, re-formed, manipulated, maintained and lost again. Evolution was a bumpy road. Nevertheless, in the longue durée, heterarchy has given way to increasing hierarchy, inequality and stratification throughout the world. The historical trend has been away from communal organization, with rising inequity.
Sources of Inequality
How could inequality have come about when there was such a strong egalitarian ethos for so long in human society? First, once there was a surplus aggrandizers were always looking for opportunities to get ahead. Aggrandizers are born opportunists. Second, the emergence of new conditions and prospects providing such opportunities could appear in a variety of ways:
Environmental change – changing material conditions in the habitat could provide some groups and individuals with an advantage providing leverage over others
Investment – achievers could develop certain aspects of the environment to their advantage e.g., improving drainage, creating reservoirs, constructing irrigation systems, etc
Migration – incoming migrants may have had to take marginal land and therefore were disadvantaged and open to subjugation by autochthones
Conquest – aggrandizers could enslave captives
Specialization – go-getters could control craft producers and other specialized activities
Feasting – in great displays of altruism, big men could have built up a prestige-base that could be converted into authority
Trade – aggressive men could have cornered the market on prestige and/or utilitarian trade items
Ritual – aggrandizers could have developed religious practices that convinced others that they had supernatural powers
Defense – highly active men could have taken on the role of defender of the settlement
Corporate groups – aggrandizers within important and powerful groups could have used kin groups, sodalities and cults as power bases
Labor control – aggrandizers could have fabricated rules to make others dependant in order to siphon off their labor value
General management – those wanting attention could have pursued construction of communal projects and elevated themselves in the process
No doubt, aggrandizers would not have been limited by any one of these strategies, but would have likely used a combination of means to achieve more prestige, power and property.
Community vs. Aggrandizement
If the ethos of egalitarianism was so enormously important to Paleolithic people for so long, how did aggrandizers emerge? Why didn’t the community move to stop inequality? Research shows that in some cases the community did inhibit the emergence of hierarchy, prestige-building, status-seeking displays and creation of debt-obligation relations. By most ethnographic accounts, primary producers in kin-based communities have the physical ability to resist siphoners taking their surplus. In tribal peoples today they often don’t resist because aspiring resource managers fabricate sociocultural formations to legitimate their privileged access to producers’ surplus. I assume that happened countless times in the past. Marx defined the socioeconomic class of an individual by his position in the flow of surplus goods. Fabricated cultural forms elevated some men to the status of material managers and that affected the flow of food and other goods.
In the flow, or processes of production in tribal peoples today, does the individual producer have total control over food grown, for example, from ground to mouth? Or is there someone of another cohort that lays claim to part of that flow? Even in kin-based societies, headman control is an inkling of class control we come to see later in history. In my Sisala research, young men and women labored to feed the elderly and headmen received the fruits of youthful labor to store in family granaries. These lineage headmen had the authority to control distribution of the stored grain backed by the power of the ancestors, who were thought to kill any junior person trying to take grain from the stores against the will of the headman. That scenario must have been repeated millions of times in agricultural history in the early Neolithic.
It is likely that, in the beginning, such control seemed innocuous in the context of communalistic kin organization. For instance, the Sisala headman doled out the surplus in a seemingly egalitarian fashion to each household in the lineage. Even if he and other elders did not labor to produce the food, they had done so for their parents. This institution leveled consumption even though one household farmer may have produced more than another farmer; yet both received equal shares from the granary. It is my belief that such “benign siphoning” could eventually have led, in some cases, to extraction of a surplus that enabled ambitious men to build power bases, which we generally call chiefdoms. While such leveling institutions seem benign, they are not entirely free from the potential to generate stratification and broader political organization.
Since individualistic traits have emerged and have even become applauded in some societies, we know that the communalistic ethos became eroded over time. Exploitative sociocultural formations have emerged historically and have come to be defined in capitalist society as to be good for society, even though the reality is that the rich are getting fabulously wealthy exponentially (persons, families, classes and nations) while the powerless and poor (persons, families, classes and nations) are falling behind. Nevertheless, the ethos of capitalism says that ultimately societies under that system will be better off than others not following the capitalistic path. Furthermore, as Michael Tigar shows in Law and the Rise of Capitalism, a legal framework has also arisen to support that form of economic activity.
How did this come about in the initial farming communities? We can only speculate, but there are good ethnographic data to show that in spite of a strong communalistic value system, over long periods of sustained practice, super-achievers were able to institute small changes in the fabric of society’s ideas, norms and practices. Most likely this was done through displays of generosity e.g., big man feasts, that built prestige as a stepping-stone to power over people and property control. For instance, a status of primus inter pares is a rung above equality. It could have been a springboard for opportunists in early societies. In chapters 8 & 9 we will see this to be the case for the Count of Barcelona in Catalonia. The count went from being one of many regional counts to because a primus inter pares and then, by manipulating feudal ceremonies, established himself as the supreme sovereign and eventually the King of Aragón and Catalonia. This took centuries to accomplish.
Elaborate public performances are commonly held in modern day tribal societies in which big men strive to demonstrate and objectify their capacity to be an organizer in society. These are not entirely politically benevolent activities. As Michael Dietler says, “Feasts are inherently political.”
Such public performances of individual power are demonstrations of ability, often connecting in the public mind the performer to Deity in one form or another. For instance, in the past, the Zuni Amerindians had active orders of sword-swallowers and men who could walk on fire. When they performed their extraordinary feats in public they achieved elevated status and were handed responsibilities for certain political and economic aspects of Zuni society. The public routine was a recital of abilities validating above average performers to be entrusted with governance and control of economic activities.
Connection to the occult was often the path to management of society’s resources e.g., professing special knowledge of minerals, herbs, plants, animals, the bush or forest (often a fearful place for many) and, in general, the ability to contact and control spirits. Among the Zuni this gave such men special privileges, for example in some cases leaders’ fields were worked by others, and the produce of the land given to the leader for redistribution or personal use (Parsons 1939). Even today, Zuni leaders may in some cases control over one-half of the total land base of a community for their own purposes” (Brandt 1994:16). Also, in communal hunts, larger shares of the animals killed were given to the leaders. Élites also had privileged access to “such things as mineral deposits” and the members of their cult groups worked mines and quarries for the production of prestige goods e.g., specialized pottery, masks, clothing or tools. Furthermore, Brandt’s fieldwork indicates, “Religious leaders or their agents often made intervillage agreements to regulate trade between and within their communities and to guarantee exclusivity of village production.” These Amerindian practices are an indication of how ancient managers arose through their public demonstrations of extraordinary powers and knowledge. Access to political power led to economic power i.e., the privilege of command gave leaders the concession of special access to goods and services.
Whatever the specifics of aggrandizing practices, inequality did not happen overnight. Most likely it was a very slow, incremental process. In my college classes I used to use the analogy of a stalagmite on a cave floor. Like drops of water depositing calcium to build up the stalagmite, managers changed society a rule at a time, building sociocultural formations of domination over long periods of practice.
Furthermore, continuing with this metaphor, a stalagmite can be eroded by wind and water and it can be broken through human activity. The same is true of institutions and sociocultural formations. After complexity was well on its way, successive generations of office-holders – chiefs, priests, diviners, leaders of secret societies, for example – could eat away at egalitarian formations, even destroying some violently. Humans make and remake their world by doing work within it. And aggrandizers are always busy remolding society to their benefit. Recently, in Afghanistan, we saw the Taliban use explosives, tanks and anti-aircraft weapons to blow apart two colossal images of the Buddha in Bamiyan Province, some 230 kms from the capital of Kabul. Why? They were doing what thousands of warlords aspiring to be kings have done throughout history. They perceived an alien, threatening symbol in the statues and destroyed them, hoping to erase to foreign script from their land. They had a new script in mind. Domination is about fostering a single vision of the world and in the messiness of history it is difficult to pull this off. It takes work. It means taking control of land, crops, herds and all sorts of material things, but it also means controlling information and cultural symbols.
Primordialism vs. Constructionism
Some authors have tried to answer the question of why complexity emerges by contrasting primordial sentiments held by tribal peoples, and presumably those of antiquity, with the constructionist activities of aggrandizers who wanted to build new poleconomic forms in society. They see these as being at odds with each other and wonder how aggrandizers could have built chiefdoms on top of such axiomatic and unchanging aspect of ancient life such as kinship and religion.
Primordialism refers to “the idea that certain cultural attributes and formations possess a prior, overriding, and determining influence on people’s lives, one that is largely immune to ‘rational’ interest and political calculation” (Smith 2000:5). In this sense, people take aspects of their lives like kinship, descent, language, religion, customs and historical territory as primeval i.e., elemental to their lives and their sense of belonging. Peoples who have such deep sentiments anthropologists used to call primitive, a term now not in vogue, but in the context of our discussion of how aggrandizers were able to fabricate new complex forms of organization in the early Neolithic, we must take it that in those ancient societies primordialism was more common than not.
It is likely that people of a group had a notion that their group was based on a spiritual principle, forming a seamless whole transcending the various members who were bound together by legends of common origins, feeling a shared historic culture, forming a single community and living according to vernacular codes in a historic homeland.
We assume that early Neolithic peoples had such feelings because similar sentiments have actually been noted in certain kinds of nations. Hans Kohn has indicated that for Europe this highly charged, sentimentalist form of nationalism exists in the Germanic East, while the more Western nations of Europe tend toward the voluntarist model of nationalism. In the former a person born into a nation can never leave it, being instilled with a certain national spirit; while in the voluntarist West, people have the right to choose which nations they wish to claim as their own (Kohn 1944 [1967]).
We also have a century or so of anthropological studies to show that many peoples still living today take this approach to their cultures. Clifford Geertz, for example, felt that ethnic and national attachments spring forth from “cultural givens” of social existence, such things as kinship, language, religion, race and customs. He noted that many tribal peoples’ sense of self is bound up in their perception of a common blood, territory, language, religion or tradition (Geertz 1973).
Yet it is important to note that some early anthropologists took native statements about the primal nature of their customs to mean that they were deterministic, that individuals were bound by their rules and institutions. That perspective has been debunked by subsequent research, which shows that native peoples are quite capable of manipulating their own customs to achieve some end, usually poleconomic in nature.
Primordial attachments rest on perception, cognition and belief, but these are malleable and early opportunists, those desiring to rise above the crowd and rule, would have been able to work within the context of primal systems to nudge people in a direction that enabled new and more complex institutions to come into being e.g., chiefship where it had not previously existed. It is not a matter of either primordialism ruling peoples’ lives or social constructionism on the part of wannabe élites; but rather aggrandizers had to be clever enough to operate in ways the supported very slight variations of primal beliefs and institutions. A smart aggrandizer would have built his ruling platform on the foundation of existing axioms and ways of life. The aspiring ruler didn’t want to upset the apple cart, he wanted to own it and the apples.
Again, we have studies that show that élites manipulate cultures to achieve new ends in the modern world. Paul Brass found that Muslim élites, for example, mobilized the Islamic masses in colonial India by manipulating religious symbols in order to preserve their own poleconomic positions at a time when British rulers in India seemed to favor Hindu élites over them. In his more instrumentalist framework, Brass saw the augmentation of Muslim ethnicity in India and the rise of Pakistani nationalism as products of manipulation of symbolic resources, such as the tradition of ummah (nation of Islam), by Muslim leaders (Brass 1979). Muslim élites trying to pull away from Britain and India were not operating in a cultural vacuum, but preexisting, primal, religious attachments and historical memories were crucial in forming a constraining milieu and molding their outlooks and possible actions. It seems that such cases indicate that in all instances of aggrandizing behavior in primordial societies, those wishing to manipulate the sociocultural formation must have used primal sentiments and institutions to their advantage and were, at the same time, constrained by them. Aggrandizers that strayed too far from primeval sentiments might have found their innovations rejected.
I take an interest-based approach to the emergence of institutions of domination, but that does not mean that primordial sentiments were trampled as opportunists elevated such institutions. More likely they were bent, circumvented and used in new ways to achieve dominance. Anthony D. Smith, writing about nations, but in a way that is applicable to any polity, says:
each nationalism and every concept of the nation is composed of different elements and dimensions, which we choose to label voluntarist and organic, civic and ethnic, primordial and instrumental. No nation, no nationalism, can be seen as purely the one or the other, even if at certain moments one or other of these elements predominates in the ensemble of components of national identity (2000:25).
My view is that polities and sociocultural formations are social constructs, however much they are perceived of as primordial (or presented by leaders as such); and within this context, aggrandizing élites wishing to rule could manipulate cultural artifacts deliberately. In the past they engineered society for their own purposes, but did so using acceptable symbols, terminology and behaviors. Deliberate élite innovation was a product of “cultural work” on the part of aggrandizers, the result of their forming élite narratives within a cultural range of sentiments and norms acceptable to their followers.
One of the collaborations between history and anthropology came about in the publication of The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm (historian) and Terrance Ranger (anthropologist) (1983). They noted that many traditions in pre-industrial societies presented in primordial clothing are actually recent inventions and fabrications on the part of élites. They are “invented traditions” created by social engineers who designed and re-designed existing symbols, mythologies, rites and legends specifically to further their poleconomic ends, while at the same time meeting the needs of the masses in complex and changing worlds in Third World countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
These “invented traditions” do not appear out of nowhere, nor can they be so farfetched as to alienate the audience aggrandizers are trying to reach. Hobsbawm writes that conscious invention succeeded “mainly in proportion to its success in broadcasting on a wavelength to which the public was ready to tune in (1983:263). That “wavelength” in the Third World is often a fine line between old ways and new ones brought on through colonialism and globalization. In the early Neolithic, it would have been an adjustment of lifeways to meet new needs and challenges brought on by the emerging availability of a storable, stealable surplus and the new fact that the have-nots wanted what the haves had.
Some have criticized the constructionist approach, claiming it to be élitist i.e., placing too much emphasis on manipulation of the masses by privileged individuals and not enough focus on popular ideas and traditions (Smith 2000:61). But, as I have said, my approach takes the general culture into account, seeing it as a molding, formative framework within which élites must operate to effectuate change. Invented traditions are not created ex nihilo, nor are élites stymied by the presence of primordial sentiments among the target population. In the past, successful aggrandizing élites were able to authenticate primal sentiments and appropriate aspects of the target culture and then they had to give a convincing account and representation of the new pathway to their constituents in terms of the primordial ways of the past.
When, for example, the Count of Barcelona was settling the wasteland called Marca Hispanica populated by a variety of peoples, he had to create anew what the French call an ethnie (see chapter 8). A. D. Smith defines it as “a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more elements of shared culture, a link with a homeland, and a measure of solidarity, at least among the élites” (2000:65). In the Catalonian context, the Count of Barcelona had the past of the Carolingian Empire to draw upon, a bounded territory in the Spanish March, an Islamic enemy to the south, the Catholic ideology and an élitist culture of domination among the castle-lords of the region to formulate an ethnie, though as I have shown elsewhere, this was not an easy process, yet eventually a strong sense of being Catalan developed and persists into today’s Spain (Mendonsa 2008).
In summary, the Paleolithic saw the humans living under egalitarian social conditions with opportunists restricted to non-hereditary forms of distinguishing themselves, but hierarchy and office did emerge in storaging, agricultural and pastoral societies. Thus, it is not the type of society that produces inequality but rather the presence of a surplus for which aggrandizing managers began to compete. Nevertheless, given many primordial values, the emergence of complexity was a process in which the new rulers had to slowly put together novel organizational forms that allowed them to eventually dominate three key means of governance in society: the means of production (control of labor), the means of destruction (control of weaponry) and the means of mystification (information control).
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