With the rise of the state all of this was swept away. For the past five or six millennia, nine-tenths of all the people who ever lived did so as peasants or as members of some other servile caste or class. With the rise of the state, ordinary men seeking to use nature’s bounty had to get someone else’s permission and had to pay for it with taxes, tribute, or extra labor. The weapons and techniques of war and organized aggression were taken away from them and turned over to specialist-soldiers and policemen controlled by military, religious, and civil bureaucrats. For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.
How did this happen? To answer, I shall have to draw a distinction between how it first happened in particular world regions and how it happened thereafter. I shall have to distinguish, in the terminology suggested by Morton Fried, between the origin of “pristine” and “secondary” states. A pristine state is one in which there is no preexisting state stimulating the process of state formation. To be sure, to the extent that no society exists in a vacuum, all developmental processes are influenced by interaction with other societies, but “there are situations in which none of the external cultures are any more complex than the one being considered, and these situations can be regarded as pristine.”
Archaeologists are moving toward agreement that there were at least three centers of pristine state development, and possibly as many as eight. The three definite instances are Mesopotamia at about 3300 B.C., Peru about the time of Christ, and Mesoamerica about A.D. 100. It is virtually certain that in the Old World pristine states also arose in Egypt (about 3100 B.C.), in the Indus Valley (shortly before 2000 B.C.), and in the Yellow River Basin of northern China (shortly after 2000 B.C.). There is considerable doubt, however, about the claim made by some prehistorians that pristine states also developed in Crete and the Aegean at about 2000 B.C. and in the Lake Region of East Africa at about A.D. 200. Controversy also surrounds the question of whether in the New World the pristine Mesoamerican state arose first in the lowland Maya region or in the Mexican highlands—a question I shall explore in the next chapter.
The rise of pristine states would appear to be best understood as a consequence of the intensification of agricultural production. Like hunter-collectors, agricultural villages tended to intensify their food production efforts in order to relieve reproductive pressures. Unlike hunter-collectors however, agriculturalists in favored soil zones can intensify their efforts for a relatively long time without suffering sharp depletions and efficiency losses. Sedentary village agriculturalists therefore tend to develop special institutions which encourage intensification by conspicuously rewarding those who work harder than others. A key part of the process by which the state’s structure of subordination developed involves the distinctive nature of the institutions responsible for rewarding production-intensifiers in sedentary pre-state agricultural villages.
Anthropologists refer to the intensifiers of agricultural production as “big men.” In their purest, most egalitarian phase, known best from studies of numerous groups in Melanesia and New Guinea, “big men” play the role of hard-working, ambitious, public-spirited individuals who inveigle their relatives and neighbors to work for them by promising to hold a huge feast with the extra food they produce. When the feast takes place, the “big man,” surrounded by his proud helpers, ostentatiously redistributes—parcels out—piles of food and other gifts but keeps nothing for himself. Under certain ecological conditions, and in the presence of warfare, these food managers could have gradually set themselves above their followers and become the original nucleus of the ruling classes of the first states.
Harvard University anthropologist Douglas Oliver carried out a classic study of “bigmanship” during his field work among the Siuai on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. Among the Siuai a “big man” is called a mumi and to achieve mumi status is every youth’s highest ambition. A young man proves himself capable of becoming a mumi by working harder than everyone else and by carefully restricting his own consumption of meat and coconuts. Eventually, he impresses his wife, children and near relatives with the seriousness of his intentions, and they vow to help him prepare for his first feast. If the feast is a success, his circle of supporters widens and he sets to work readying an even greater display of generosity. He aims next at the construction of a men’s clubhouse in which his male followers can lounge about and in which guests can be entertained and fed. Another feast is held at the consecration of the clubhouse, and if this is also a success his circle of supporters—people willing to work for the feast to come—grows still larger and he will begin to be spoken of as a mumi. What do his supporters get from all this? Even though larger and larger feasts mean that the mumi’s demands on his supporters become more irksome, the overall volume of production goes up. So if they occasionally grumble about how hard they have to work, the followers nevertheless remain loyal as long as their mumi continues to maintain or increase his renown as a “great provider.”
Finally the time comes for the new mumi to challenge the others who have risen before him. This is done at a muminai feast, where a tally is kept of all the pigs, coconut pies, and sago-almond puddings given away by the host mumi and his followers to the guest mumi and his followers. If the guest mumi cannot reciprocate in a year or so with a feast at least as lavish as that of his challengers, he suffers great social humiliation and his fall from “mumihood” is immediate. In deciding on whom to challenge, a mumi must be very careful. He tries to choose a guest whose downfall will increase his own reputation but he must avoid one whose capacity to retaliate exceeds his own.
At the end of a successful feast, the greatest of mumis still faces a lifetime of personal toil and dependency on the moods and inclinations of his followers. “Mumihood”—at least, as Oliver observed it—does not confer the power to coerce others into doing one’s bidding, nor does it elevate one’s standard of living above anyone else’s. In fact, since giving things away is the lifeblood of “mumihood,” great mumis may even consume less meat and other delicacies than an ordinary, undistinguished Siuai. Among the Kaoka, another Solomon Island group reported on by H. Ian Hogbin, there is the saying: “The giver of the feast takes the bones and the stale cakes; the meat and the fat go to the others.”
Moreover, a mumi cannot rest on his laurels but must constantly prepare for new challenges. At a great feast attended by 1,100 people on January 10, 1939, the host mumi, whose name was Soni, gave away thirty-two pigs plus a large quantity of sago-almond puddings. Soni and his closest followers, however, went hungry. “We shall eat Soni’s renown,” the followers said. That night, exhausted from weeks of feverish preparations, they talked about the rest they had earned now that the feast was over. But early the next morning they were awakened by the booming sound of wooden gongs being beaten in Soni’s clubhouse. A handful of sleepy people straggled over to see who was making all the noise. It was Soni, and this is what he told them:
“Hiding in your houses again; copulating day and night while there’s work to be done! Why, if it were left up to you, you would spend the rest of your lives smelling yesterday’s pig. But I tell you yesterday’s feast was nothing. The next one will be really big.”
Formerly, the mumis were as famous for their ability to get men to fight for them as they were for their ability to get men to work for them. Warfare had been suppressed by the colonial authorities long before Oliver carried out his study, but the memory of mumi war leaders was still vivid among the Siuai. As one old man put it:
“In the olden times there were greater mumi than there are today. Then they were fierce and relentless war leaders. They laid wa
ste to the countryside and their clubhouses were lined with the skulls of people they had slain.”
In singing the praises of their mumis, the generation of pacified Siuai call them “warriors” and “killers of men and pigs.”
Thunderer, Earth-shaker,
Maker of many feasts,
How empty of gong sounds will all the places be when you leave us!
Warrior, Handsome Flower,
Killer of men and pigs,
Who will bring renown to our places When you leave us?
Oliver’s informants told him that mumis had more authority in the days when warfare was still being practiced. Some mumi war leaders even kept one or two prisoners who were treated like slaves and forced to work in the mumi’s family gardens. And people could not talk “loud and slanderously against their mumis without fear of punishment.” This fits theoretical expectations since the ability to redistribute meat, plant food, and other valuables goes hand in hand with the ability to attract a following of warriors, equip them for combat, and reward them with spoils of battle. Rivalry between Bougainville’s war-making mumis appeared to have been leading toward an island-wide political organization when the first European voyagers arrived. According to Oliver, “for certain periods of time many neighboring villages fought together so consistently that there emerged a pattern of war-making regions, each more or less internally peaceful and each containing one outstanding mumi whose war activities provided internal social cohesion.” These regional mumis undoubtedly enjoyed some rudiments of coercive power. Nonetheless, the Siuai’s approach toward classes based on differential power prerogatives remained incipient and evanescent. This is shown by the fact that mumis had to provide their warriors with prostitutes brought into the clubhouses and with gifts of pork and other delicacies. Said one old warrior:
“If the mumi didn’t furnish us with women, we were angry.… All night long we would copulate and still want more. It was the same with eating. The clubhouse used to be filled with food, and we ate and ate and never had enough. Those were wonderful times.”
Furthermore, the mumi who wanted to lead a war party had to be prepared personally to pay an indemnity for any of his men who were killed in battle and to furnish a pig for each man’s funeral feast. (As if, in the interest of keeping up a proper respect for ordinary human lives, we were to oblige our own political and military “big men” to pay the insured value of each combat death out of their own pockets.)
Let me give another illustration of how redistributor war chiefs could have evolved little by little into permanent rulers with coercive control over production and consumption. About 125 miles north of the eastern tip of New Guinea lies the Trobriand archipelago, a small group of low coral islands studied by the great Polish-bora ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski. Trobriander society was divided into several matrilineal clans and subclans of unequal rank and privilege through which access to garden lands was inherited. Malinowski reported that the Trobrianders were “keen on fighting” and that they conducted “systematic and relentless wars,” venturing across the open ocean in their canoes to trade—or, if need be, to fight—with the people of islands over a hundred miles away. Unlike the Siuai mumis, the Trobriand “big men” occupied hereditary offices and could be deposed only through defeat in war. One of these, whom Malinowski considered to be the “paramount chief” of all the Trobrianders, held sway over more than a dozen villages containing several thousand people all told. (His actual status was some-what less exalted since others claimed to be his equal.) Chieftainships were hereditary within the wealthiest and largest subclans, and the Trobrianders attributed these inequalities to wars of conquest carried out long ago. Only the chiefs could wear certain shell ornaments as the insignia of high rank, and it was forbidden for any commoner to stand or sit in a position that put a chief’s head at a lower elevation than anyone else’s. Malinowski tells of seeing all the people present in the village of Bwoytalu drop from their verandas “as if mowed down by a hurricane,” at the sound of the drawn-out “O guya’u!” that announced the arrival of an important chief.
Despite such displays of reverence, a chiefs actual power was limited. It rested ultimately upon his ability to play the role of “great provider,” which depended on ties of kinship and marriage rather than on the control of weapons and resources. Residence among the Trobriand commoners was normally avunculocal. Adolescent boys lived in bachelor huts until they got married. They then took their brides to live in their mother’s brother’s household, where they jointly worked the garden lands of the husband’s matrilineage. In recognition of the existence of matrilineal descent, at harvest time brothers acknowledged that a portion of the produce of the matrilineal lands was owed to their sisters and sent them presents of baskets filled with yams, their staple crop. The Trobriand chief relied on this custom to maintain his political and economic base. He married the sisters of the headman of a large number of sublineages. Some chiefs acquired as many as two dozen wives, each of whom was entitled to an obligatory gift of yams from her brothers. These yams were delivered to the chief’s village and displayed on special yam racks. Some of the yams were then redistributed in elaborate feasts in which the chief validated his position as a “great provider,” while the remainder were used to feed canoe-building specialists, artisans, magicians, and family servants who thereby fell under the chiefs control and enhanced his power. Undoubtedly, in former times the yam stores also furnished the base for launching long-distance trading and raiding expeditions.
So, even though they feared and respected their “great provider” war chiefs, the Trobriand commoners were still a long way from being reduced to peasant status. Living on islands, the Trobrianders were not free to spread out, and their population density had risen in Malinowski’s time to sixty persons per square mile. Nonetheless, the chiefs could not control enough of the production system to acquire great power. There were no cereal grains and yams rot after three or four months, which means that the Trobriand “great provider” could not manipulate people through dispensing food nor could he support a permanent police-military garrison out of his stores. An equally important factor was the open resources of the lagoons and ocean from which the Trobrianders derived their protein supply. The Trobriand chief could not cut off access to these resources and hence could never exercise genuine permanent coercive political control over his subordinates. But with more intense forms of agriculture and large harvests of grains, the power of “great providers” evolved far beyond that of the Trobriand chief.
As Colin Renfrew has pointed out, the writing of eighteenth-century naturalist William Bartram contains a graphic account of the importance of redistribution in the social structure of North American agricultural societies. Bartram’s description of the Cherokee, the original owners of much of the Tennessee Valley, shows a redistributive system functioning in a manner roughly similar to that of the Trobrianders, despite the totally different “flavor” of Eastern Woodland and Melanesian cultures. The Cherokee, like the Iroquois, had matrilineal and matrilocal institutions and practiced external warfare. Their principal crops were maize, beans, and squash. At the center of the principal settlements was a large, circular “council house” where the council of chiefs discussed issues involving many villages and where redistributive feasts were held. The council of chiefs had a supreme chief, or mico, who was the central node in the Cherokee redistributive network. Bartram reported that at harvest time a large crib, identified as the “mico’s granary,” was erected in each field. “To this each family carries and deposits a certain quantity according to his ability or inclination, or none at all if he so chooses.” The mico’s granaries functioned as “a public treasury … to fly to for succor” in the case of crop failure, as a source of food “to accommodate strangers, or travellers,” and as a military store “when they go forth on hostile expeditions.” Although according to Bartram every citizen enjoyed “the right of free and public access,” commoners clearly had to acknowledge that
the store really belonged to the supreme chief since the “treasure is at the disposal of the king or mico” who had “an exclusive right and ability … to distribute comfort and blessings to the necessitous.” The fact that the mico, like the Trobriand chief, was far from actually being a “king” shows up clearly in Bartram’s comment that when outside the council “he associates with the people as a common man, converses with them, and they with him in perfect ease and familiarity.”
Redistribution undoubtedly provides the key to the understanding of numerous ancient monuments and structures which for centuries have puzzled scholars and tourists. As we have seen, from mumis on up, “big men,” headmen, and chiefs have the capacity to organize labor on behalf of communal enterprises. Among such enterprises was the construction, involving hundreds of workers, of large canoes, buildings, tombs, and monuments. Colin Renfrew has drawn attention to the rather striking similarity between the circular wooden Cherokee feast center council houses and the mysterious circular buildings whose wooden post holes have been found within the precincts of neolithic ceremonial enclosures, or “henges,” in Great Britain and northern Europe. The increasingly elaborate burial chambers, earth mounds, and megalithic alignments characteristic of the period from 4000 B.C. to 2000 B.C. in Europe have rather precise parallels among the mounds erected by prehistoric inhabitants of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the stone burial platforms and monolithic statuary of Polynesia, and the monolithic tombs and memorials of modern Borneo. All of these constructions played a role in the smooth functioning of pre-state redistributive systems, serving as the locus for redistributive feasts, community rituals dedicated to controlling the forces of nature, and memorials to the generosity and prowess of deceased “big man” hero chiefs. They seem enigmatic only because they are the skeletons, not the substance, of redistributive systems. Since we cannot see the investment of extra labor in agricultural production, monument-building appears to be a kind of irrational obsession among these ancient peoples. But viewed within the living context of a redistributive system, tombs, megaliths, and temples appear as functional components whose costs are slight in comparison with the increased harvests which the ritualized intensification of agricultural production makes possible.
Cannibals and Kings Page 9
