The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (19 page)

The men’s house, called
arichu
in Ao, or
morung
in Assamese, was built inside the village’s defensive palisade. It was a magnificent building, 50 feet long and 20 feet wide, with its front gable soaring 30 feet above the ground. Since the arichu was a dormitory-style men’s house, it had sleeping benches around the walls. To protect sleeping youths from the enemy spears thrust through the walls during raids, the eaves of the house extended to the ground. The largest vertical posts were carved with human figures, tigers, hornbills, or elephants. The arichu was rebuilt every six years, at which time animals were sacrificed and a neighboring village was raided to obtain an enemy head for good luck.

A pioneering account of the arichu was provided by James P. Mills, who lived in Assam during the early twentieth century. Mills reports that the boys of each village were divided into three-year cohorts based on age, and that they remained within their cohorts for life. Boys between 12 and 14 years of age, referred to as “unripe,” entered the men’s house for the first time. Between 15 and 17, when they were “ripening,” they were joined by a new cohort of boys, 12 to 14. They became “arichu leaders” between 18 and 20 and could accompany older kinsmen on head-hunting raids. After two more three-year stages, most of them were married men and considered “clan leaders.” When they were between 27 and 29, they were “councilors” and got the biggest share of meat at ritual feasts. Finally, when they were between 36 and 38, they were declared “priests.” This term implies that a gradual increase in virtue was involved.

Well into middle age, each man still considered himself part of his age cohort and an alumnus of his men’s house. Every Ao boy in an arichu, according to Mills, had undergone socialization equivalent to that received by boys at British schools such as Eton and Harrow. In other words, among Ao males, it “took a men’s house to raise a child.”

THE RITUAL MEN’S HOUSES OF THE MOUNTAIN OK

Let us look next at the western highlands of New Guinea. Here 15,000 people, referred to as the Mountain Ok, made a living in roughly 4,000 square miles of forest by growing taro, raising pigs, and hunting and fishing. Many Ok considered themselves the descendants of Afek, a female creator and ancestor, who gave birth to people and designed their ritual life. According to anthropologist Maureen Anne MacKenzie, the Ok venerated their ancestors and beseeched them for success in hunting, warfare, gardening, and pig raising. To maintain contact with those ancestors, the Ok kept skulls and skeletal parts of the deceased in their ritual houses.

Among the Ok, men’s and women’s ceremonies were separate; each gender was therefore excluded from the other’s ritual houses. The village of Telefol, where MacKenzie lived, had five kinds of ritual buildings: three for the men and two for the women (
Figure 12
). Examples of such buildings were as follows:

The
kabeel am,
or “hornbill house,” for new male initiates

The
yolam,
or
ogen am,
“ancestor house,” for previously initiated men

The
katibam,
or “old men’s house,” also for previously initiated men

The
dungam,
or
am katib,
a hut where women were secluded while giving birth

The
unan am,
a ritual venue for women

FIGURE 12.
   The traditional Mountain Ok of New Guinea built multiple men’s houses, allowing relics from logically contradictory parts of their cosmology to be kept separate. The village of Telefol, for example, had three small ritual houses for male initiates and two small ritual houses used by women.

Not far from Telefol lay Baktaman, another Mountain Ok village. This village had four ritual men’s houses, as follows:

The
katiam
was a building for curating hunting trophies and making sacrifices to increase the yields of gardens. Miscellaneous bones of the ancestors might be kept there.

The
yolam,
or “ancestor house,” was dedicated to rituals of warfare and crop increase. It often contained two sacred fires and the skulls of ancestors from several different clans.

The “taro house” was a residence for senior men.

The “house of the mothers” was, in spite of its name, a place for the veneration of male ancestors.

Anthropologist Fredrik Barth, who lived for a time in Baktaman, explains why the Ok needed four men’s houses with different ritual themes. All cosmologies have logical contradictions, and Ok cosmology was no exception. Having four different ritual houses enabled the Ok to keep incompatible relics from different parts of their cosmology in separate buildings.

Because Ok religion was focused on the ancestors, the bones of deceased kin were often used in rituals. Many of the skulls kept in the yolam were decorated for this purpose. Barth says, however, that the specific identities of deceased individuals were not important; the skulls simply represented generic ancestors. This situation fits the findings of anthropologist Igor Kopytoff, who discovered that among African societies comparable to the Ok, “ancestor” was also a generic category. Once deceased, the ancestors lost their individual characteristics and became another class of village elder.

Achieved inequality can be subtle. It becomes visible in Ok society when we consider who had access to the men’s house. Ok men were initiated into the secrets of ritual one step at a time, and the whole process could take 10–20 years. “Rubbish men” never made it. A small core of prominent men monopolized the bulk of the mythical and cosmological knowledge, setting themselves apart as a low-level religious elite.

Barth found 11 initiated men actually living in the katiam at Baktaman. Fifteen partially initiated men had attended rituals in the katiam but were not allowed to live there. Some 128 uninitiated men had never been allowed past the door. Thus 80 percent of the Ok men were just as excluded from the katiam as the women were.

It is also the case that only fully initiated men could enter the yolam to perform ceremonies. It was in the yolam that village elders planned raids against enemy villages and carried out rituals to guarantee success. The enemies of the Ok knew this, of course; as a result, the men’s house was often the first building burned when an Ok village was raided.

As Barth points out, having so much ritual information concentrated in the minds of so few men could have consequences. Sometimes senior men died without passing on the full cosmology. Sometimes the training took so many years that a young man’s mentors forgot the details. All such lapses, Barth learned, provided opportunities for revising cosmologies and modifying rituals. Religions transmitted orally, as mentioned earlier, can change in ways that religions with printed texts cannot.

THE KAPOSO OF THE SOLOMON ISLANDS

Six hundred miles out in the Pacific, east of New Guinea, lie the Solomon Islands. The largest of the Solomons is Bougainville, whose societies share with New Guinea the raising of pigs, sago, taro, yams, and sweet potatoes.

In 1938 there were 4,700 members of an ethnic group called the Siuai living on 250 square miles of Bougainville. Prior to coming under Australian administration, the Siuai (pronounced “See-ooh-eye”) had tended to live in small, scattered hamlets of one to nine households. These hamlets were linked by a series of trails through the forest.

Siuai society paid more attention to the mother’s descent line, because it was the corporate custodian of garden land. As a result, a mother’s genealogy extended back four or five generations, while the father’s genealogy tended to be shallower.

Men were seen as inherently superior in virtue, strength, and ambition, yet their wives raised the pigs that facilitated a man’s social advancement. A further irony lay in the fact that although the immediate source of a man’s prestige was his accumulation of pigs and shell valuables, he could not afford the latter without the capital created by the garden land of his mother’s lineage.

There were four types of gifts among the Siuai: the usual reciprocal gifts between relatives and friends; bride-price and dowry exchanges between the relatives of a bride and groom; coercive gifts, used to enforce social obligations; and competitive gifts, used to humiliate rivals. The latter were given by men with
haokom,
or ambition, who desired
potu,
or renown. If such a person succeeded, he became a Big Man.

Like the Chimbu of New Guinea, the Siuai had many levels of prestige. At the bottom were lowly men, referred to as “legs” because they performed menial tasks for men of renown. In the middle were the modestly successful men who constituted the bulk of society. At the top were men of prestige, a few of whom stood out as
mumis.
Mumis were the biggest of all Big Men, individuals of intelligence and industriousness, charisma and diplomacy, and generosity and executive ability. Just as in the Mt. Hagen region of New Guinea, a man whose father was a mumi, or whose mother was a mumi’s daughter, had role models who increased his chances of making it to the top.

When anthropologist Douglas Oliver lived among the Siuai during the period 1938–1939, he overheard the same nostalgic comments that Paula Brown had heard among the Chimbu. There had been “real mumis” in the good old days, the Siuai said, before the suppression of warfare. Long ago there were war leaders who “lined our men’s houses with the skulls of people slain.” Today the Siuai were reduced to “fighting verbally,” humiliating rivals with gifts and feasts.

By 1938 the most common path to renown was to accumulate
manunu
(“wealth”) while attracting supporters, messengers, and “legs.” The more wives a man had, the more gardens he had access to, and the more pigs his family could raise. He used his entrepreneurial skills to trade for shell valuables that could be exchanged for additional pigs. As his prestige grew, he would be welcomed into a men’s ritual society, giving him access to a
kaposo,
or men’s house. His hope was that one day he would have the resources to build his own.

Every man of renown, of course, had rivals. Putting pressure on his relatives and in-laws, he accumulated the plant foods, pigs, and shells to eliminate the competition. His strategy was to plan a huge pig feast called a
muminae
and then, at the last minute, announce that one of his rivals would be the guest of honor. That news would be spread by the throbbing beat of the wooden slit-gongs in his men’s house, and the message would be defiant: “So-and-so many dozens of pigs will be butchered, and my honored rival will be rendered near death by humiliation, since there is no way that he can reciprocate.”

In his rise to the top a mumi had supernatural help. He had been befriended by a
kapuna,
a
horomorun,
or both. The kapuna was a humanlike supernatural being who was an ancestor of the line of women leading to his mother. The horomorun was a malevolent spirit, “the mumi of all demons,” so powerful that it could cause death. This demon spent time in the men’s house, identified potential leaders, and then announced its desire to ally itself with one of them by making the man temporarily ill.

Once the future mumi had recovered from his illness, he bonded with the horomorun, and the man was protected by the demon’s magic. In return the mumi would supply the demon with its favorite beverage: pig’s blood. At each feast the horomorun would drink its fill before the human guests were served. In this Faustian relationship the well-nourished demon grew stronger as the mumi grew in prestige. No one could be jealous of the mumi’s success because he had been chosen by the demon itself.

Somewhere along a major trail between settlements, the mumi built a men’s house where the demon could enjoy itself. Using accumulated shell valuables, the mumi paid men from other hamlets to help his relatives complete the task.

FIGURE 13.
   In the traditional Siuai society of Bougainville, the
kaposo,
or men’s house, was built by a Big Man called a
mumi.
The mumi’s extraordinary achievements were attributed to the supernatural aid of a demon. Some mumis paid to have huge tree trunks hauled to the men’s house and carved into slit-gongs. This illustration, based on a 70-year-old photo, shows the hauling of a future slit-gong across a river.