The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (10 page)

FIGURE 4.
   The drawings here, based on photographs more than a century old, illustrate witchcraft and group revenge among the Australian Aborigines. At
a,
two men of Clan A work black magic on a man of Clan B by pointing a bone toward his camp; at
b,
the victim’s clansmen examine his tree burial to deduce who caused his death; at
c,
a vengeance party from Clan B sets out to take revenge on Clan A. Such was the origin of small-scale raiding, which set the stage for war.

Among the Murngin of northern Arnhem Land, however, one can see the germ of an institution with the potential to create significant differences in prestige. This was an intertribal trading system called
mari-kutatra,
used to obtain much of the paraphernalia used in ritual. Among the items circulating were wooden spears, parrot feathers, beeswax, resin, red ocher, and beads. The farther away a man’s trade goods came from, the more highly prized they were and the greater his renown as an entrepreneur. At the time of W. Lloyd Warner’s study, the mari-kutatra had yet to turn anyone into a prestigious “Big Man” like those we will meet in later chapters. It would have taken only a few changes in logic, however, to nudge the system in that direction.

FOUR

Why Our Ancestors Had Religion and the Arts

Each hunting-and-gathering society discussed so far had its own distinctive character. All, however, featured a set of common principles, a few of which we list here.

  1. Generosity is admirable; selfishness is reprehensible.

  2. The social relationship created by a gift is more valuable than the gift itself.

  3. All gifts should be reciprocated; however, a reasonable delay before reciprocating is acceptable.

  4. Names are magic and should not be casually assigned.

  5. Since all humans are reincarnated, ancestors’ names should be treated with particular respect.

  6. Homicide is unacceptable. A killer’s relatives should either execute him or pay reparations to the victim’s family.

  7. Do not commit incest; get your spouse from outside your immediate kin.

  8. In return for a bride, the groom should provide her family with services or gifts.

  9. Marriage is a flexible economic partnership; it allows for multiple spouses and variations.

In addition to these principles, which imply no inequality among members of society, we also encountered some premises that allowed for a degree of inequality. They were as follows:

10. Men have the capacity to be more virtuous or ritually pure than women.

11. Youths should defer to seniors.

12. Late arrivals should defer to those who were here first.

In those societies that featured lineages, clans, or ancestor-based descent groups, the following new premises appeared:

13. When lineages grow and divide, the junior lineage should defer to the senior lineage, since the latter was here first.

14. You are born into your family, but you must be initiated into your clan.

15. The bad news is that initiation will be an ordeal. The good news is that you will learn ritual secrets, become more fully a member of your ethnic group, and perhaps gain virtue.

16. Any offense against a member of your lineage or clan, such as murder or serious insult, is an offense against that entire social unit. It requires a group response against some member (or members) of the offending group.

17. Any armed conflict should be followed by rituals of peacemaking.

Many of the aforementioned principles are considered “cultural universals,” shared by virtually all societies. It should come as no surprise that another widespread social attitude is ethnocentricity. Each society believes that its behavior is appropriate, while its neighbors do things improperly. Foragers, however, tend to be philosophical about these differences. Convinced that each human group has a different origin and different ancestors, foragers adjust to their neighbors rather than try to change them. Ethnocentricity thus need not lead to intolerance, although in larger-scale societies it sometimes does.

Another widespread principle is that in life there are no accidents; everything happens for a reason. If you fall ill, it is because you have offended a spirit. If you die, it is because someone has worked witchcraft on you. Failed hunts are the outcome of hunting magic done wrong. Failed harvests are the result of rituals incorrectly performed.

The latter premise, of course, did not disappear with the Ice Age. We know that the Power Ball Lottery depends on randomly generated numbers. Yet we often hear the winner, interviewed beside his newly purchased RV, attribute his victory to supernatural intervention. Then he adds, “I believe that everything happens for a reason.”

COSMOLOGY AND SOCIAL LOGIC

Cosmology is a universal institution. All societies have a story that explains how the universe and its beings came into existence. Since no humans were present at the origin of the cosmos, the story is of necessity a myth. Anthropologists define
myth
as a folktale believed to be true and regarded as sacred. Myth differs from
legend,
which is also believed to be true but not regarded as sacred.

Most foragers’ creation myths begin with a chaotic Earth that is without form or void. Often there is no light until a spirit or creature requests it. The first humans were created from earth or clay, from plants or animals, or from half-formed beasts. The original humans often had superpowers, magic, or the ability to speak directly with animals. They lost these abilities, often as a form of punishment, when they took on their final form.

Creation myths, however, are more than just folktales. Myths serve as charters for social groups. They include instructions from supernatural spirits on how to earn a living and behave toward each other. In the case of the foragers discussed so far, their cosmology generated many principles of their social logic.

That same cosmology supplies yet another universal premise: many beings, objects, and places are sacred.

Questions about the antiquity of the sacred come up frequently. Many Western scientists cannot believe that people as pragmatic as hunters and gatherers would invest their energy in something as irrational as belief in the sacred. A number of biologists and psychologists, whose views are discussed in a recent synthesis by Nicholas Wade, have concluded that religion might have a genetic basis.

For their part, anthropologists are skeptical about the existence of genes for religion. They can think of many ways that a concept of the sacred could emerge from logic alone.

Consider, for example, the Zapotec Indians of southern Mexico, who referred to the wind as
pèe.
No one can see the wind, but the Zapotec were sure it existed because they could feel it on their faces, see it bend trees, and hear it howl during storms. They recognized the similarity between that wind and the equally invisible breath that flowed in and out of their bodies while they were alive. No special gene was required to convince the Zapotec that wind was a sacred force; for them, breath was the difference between life and death. As with all human groups, Zapotec rationality had its limits, and the Zapotec chose never to say “nobody knows.” For them, pèe came to mean “wind,” “breath,” and “sacred life force.”

For hunters and gatherers, as we have seen, the transition from natural to supernatural was seamless. The Netsilik were raised not only to harpoon seals but also to give the dead seal a drink and return its bladder to the sea. Once reincarnated, the seal would remember the hunter’s kindness and allow itself to be harpooned again. That seemed entirely logical.

Anthropologist Roy Rappaport, who experienced firsthand the power of the sacred in New Guinea society, has provided us with a framework for the study of religion. Rappaport argues that all religion consists of three components. First are the
ultimate sacred propositions,
beliefs considered irrefutable despite the fact that there is no empirical evidence to support them. These propositions direct the second component,
ritual,
which must be performed repeatedly and correctly in order to achieve its goals. If done correctly, ritual induces the third component, an
awe-inspiring experience.
Because this experience deeply stirs the emotions of the participants, it verifies the sacred propositions in a way that cold, hard logic could not.

For archaeologists, ritual is the key component of this self-validating system. Because ritual requires paraphernalia, costumes, pigments, and musical instruments, and because it must be performed over and over again, it leaves archaeological traces. We have seen them already in our discussion of the Ice Age.

In recent years we have heard several prominent Western scientists argue that religion could be dispensed with. Rappaport, however, points out that any institution as universal as religion must have contributed to the survival of human groups, otherwise it would long since have disappeared or been replaced by something else. Without acknowledgment of the sacred, there would be nothing to give the ultimate propositions the
gravitas
they need to generate the first principles of social logic.

What appears to bother Western scientists the most is that religion so often seems at loggerheads with science and social progress. This situation conflicts with the widespread assumption that humans are rational thinkers.

Part of the problem, we suspect, is that many scientists are wrong about why humans have language and intelligence in the first place. Because those human attributes originated in the context of foraging, they assume that the purpose of language and intelligence was to make us better at hunting and gathering. After all, our ancestors learned to classify hundreds of plants and animals, shout instructions to each other during hunts, and create technologies to convert superficially unappetizing plants into meals.

The trouble with this assumption is that our earliest ancestors shared the African savanna with animals that could hunt game and convert plants into meals more efficiently than humans ever could. So let us suggest an alternative scenario: human language and intelligence evolved not to make us better at foraging but to make us better at social networking.

If our ancestors had been as pragmatic as some scientists believe, there would have been no need for a concept of the sacred. But in addition to being verbal and intelligent, our ancestors were arguably the most emotional, moralistic, superstitious, and (sometimes) irrational creatures on earth.

To be sure, our ancestors had an incredible knowledge of plants and animals, but their most important intelligence was social intelligence. Their classifications often include not only every living human they come into contact with but every ancestor, including some who were supernatural. The result is that foragers can create larger societies, larger networks of sharing and cooperating individuals, than those of any of their primate relatives. To underscore this, let us consider some of the data that have accumulated since Marshall Sahlins wrote his classic comparison of apes and early humans.

What Have You Done with My Dominance Hierarchy?

Chimpanzees, with whom we share 98 percent of our DNA, have strong social inequality. They display a dominance hierarchy or “pecking order” in which alpha individuals dominate all others, beta individuals dominate all but the alphas, and so on down the hierarchy to the lowliest omega.

It is not predetermined who the alphas will be. Chimps live in troops, and their social structure emerges from a series of interactions among individuals in the troop. These interactions, some confrontational, determine who the alphas, betas, and gammas will be. Nor is the hierarchy set in stone; betas have been seen forming alliances to overthrow an alpha by force. One of the victorious betas then takes over the fallen leader’s place.

According to primatologists
John
Mitani, David Watts, and Martin Miller, one of the ways that male chimps learn to create alliances is by hunting colobus monkeys together and sharing the meat. This food sharing could be seen as a precursor to the sharing of meat by human foragers. It does not, however, extend beyond the limits of the troop. No one has ever seen members of two chimpanzee troops meet at the border between their territories and exchange food. In fact, groups of males from Troop A have been observed ambushing and killing isolated males from Troop B. Thus when a troop of chimps has depleted the food in its territory, it cannot appeal for help to a neighboring troop. Chimps cannot do what human foragers do: accumulate social obligations with their neighbors as a hedge against lean times.

It was not the ability to hunt with spears instead of teeth that created the greatest differences between human foragers and apes. By giving humans the capacity for language and culture, natural selection enabled them to reach beyond their local group and make relatives out of strangers. Their use of words to create clan members, section members, gift partners, and namesakes, and to establish mutual obligations and systems of bride exchange, enabled human society to spread to every corner of the earth.