The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (32 page)

In contrast, the premises of gumsa society were as follows:

  1. All lineages are ranked relative to one another.

  2. Villages are no longer autonomous; all settlements within a territory are controlled by a single chief.

  3. Everyone who does not belong to the chief’s lineage must pay him tribute, usually in the form of a thigh from every animal sacrificed.

  4. Individuals of high hereditary rank must pay more compensation (interest) for their debts.

  5. Families of elite brides can request a higher bride-price.

  6. The giver of the bride is considered superior to the recipient.

  7. To encourage older sons to leave home and found a new lineage elsewhere, all property is left to the youngest son.

  8. Any lineage that grows and splits results in senior and junior lineages, with the former dominant.

  9. One’s loyalty is to one’s lineage rather than to a place.

10. The hereditary chief is to be advised by a council of lineage heads.

11. All land is controlled by the chief’s lineage.

12. Lower-ranking people continue to make sacrifices to their household ancestors, and to lesser sky and earth spirits. Chiefs alone make sacrifices to the regional spirit of their lineage, as well as to the supreme sky spirit Madai, his daughter Hpraw Nga, and the supreme earth spirit Shadip. Chiefs are allowed to sacrifice to the highest spirits of earth and sky, because those spirits are now considered remote ancestors of the chief’s lineage.

Explaining the Shift from Achievement-Based Leadership to Hereditary Rank

We know which premises of social logic had to change in order for Kachin lineages to become ranked. We now consider three alternative scenarios for how it might have happened.

One scenario, proposed by Leach, includes interactions with a more complex neighboring society, called the Shan. The Shan differed from the Kachin in significant ways. Instead of practicing long-fallow, slash-and-burn agriculture in the highlands, the Shan were supported by permanent wet-rice paddies in the riverine lowlands. Shan agriculture was so productive that it could support princely states with lineages of aristocrats, commoners, and slaves. While the Kachin sacrificed to spirits of the earth and sky, Shan rulers had been converted to Buddhism.

Hereditary aristocrats sought to communicate their rank through displays of valuables called sumptuary goods. The sumptuary goods sought by the Shan included jade, amber, tortoise shell, gold, and silver. The resources of the Kachin hill country included all these items. Significantly, the Kachin were chronically short of rice, while the Shan produced a surplus.

For several generations the family of the
saohpa,
or Shan prince, of a district called Möng Hkawm sent noble Shan women to marry the Kachin leaders who controlled the jade mines of the hill region. Sometimes a dowry of wet-rice land accompanied the bride. The Kachin chief reciprocated with raw materials for sumptuary goods.

One effect of this intermarriage, according to Leach, was that it encouraged the shift from gumlao to gumsa. Having a Shan wife raised the prestige of a Kachin leader and encouraged him to model his behavior on that of a Shan prince. Incipient Kachin chiefs might convert to Buddhism, dress like a Shan, and adopt Shan ritual and symbolism. They did so in spite of a serious contradiction in social logic: the mayu-dama relationship of the Kachin, in which the recipient of the bride was inferior, was incompatible with Shan logic. Shan princes all had multiple wives, and it would be unthinkable for any of their marriages to make them someone else’s dama.

While ambitious Kachin leaders considered Shan-like behavior a mark of prestige, it only increased their followers’ resentment and hastened their overthrow. The result was an inherently unstable situation in which hereditary inequality was repeatedly created, lasted for a few generations, and then collapsed.

The strength of Leach’s scenario is its grounding in historical fact. While it accounts for the imitation of Shan behavior by Kachin chiefs, however, Leach’s scenario relies on intervention by Shan princes. We would prefer a scenario like Harrison’s for Avatip, which shows us one subclan trying to steal all ritual authority from its rivals. The strength of the Avatip scenario is that it does not assume intervention by princely neighbors.

Anthropologist Jonathan Friedman has proposed such a scenario, based mainly on Kachin behavior but augmented by what we know of various Naga groups. Friedman’s scenario begins with a society whose lineages are equal in rank, like the gumlao version of Kachin society. Each local lineage has its own set of ancestor spirits, arranged in short genealogies of three or four generations. There is also a village nat whose domain is the local territory. On a higher plane lie the earth nats and sky nats which, in the egalitarian mode of Kachin society, can receive sacrifices from any lineage through the intervention of its ancestral spirits.

In Friedman’s scenario the creation of hereditary rank takes place when one lineage convinces all the others that the village nat is its ancestor. That move converts one Kachin social unit into a chiefly lineage, descended from the nat who rules the whole territory. At this point the Kachin revise their cosmology to allege that their most highly ranked lineage is descended from Madai, while their lower-ranking lineages are descended from the lesser nat Thunder.

Friedman was aware that the most difficult task facing a would-be chiefly lineage was making its privileges palatable to others. In his scenario that palatability was based on a familiar premise, one we saw earlier among achievement-based societies like the Siuai of Bougainville: if one was extraordinarily successful, it meant that one had a special relationship with a supernatural being.

In Kachin society the lineages that worked the hardest and produced the greatest surplus could sponsor the most prestigious sacrifices and feed the most visitors. Their fellow Kachin, however, did not attribute such success to hard work; they believed that one only obtained good harvests through proper sacrifices to the nats. Wealth was seen not so much as the product of labor (and control over others’ labor) as the result of pleasing the appropriate celestial spirits. The key shift in social logic was therefore from “They must have pleased the nats” to “They must be descended from higher nats than we are.”

Once one lineage was seen as having descended from the nats that ruled a region, it made sense that that lineage should control the region’s lands. It was also entitled to receive tribute from other lineages, because it alone could intercede on society’s behalf with the highest nats.

As we shall see later in this book, Friedman’s scenario resonates with the archaeological record in highland Mexico, where the earliest evidence for hereditary rank was accompanied by depictions of what appear to be the spirits of Earth and Sky.

Unfortunately, some archaeologists have oversimplified Friedman’s scenario to the point of implausibility. What they have argued is that hereditary inequality was generated by competitive feasting. There are several problems with this oversimplification. As we have seen in previous chapters, competitive feasting in achievement-based societies usually escalated only after warfare had ceased to be a path to prominence. Instead of creating hereditary rank, it produced individual Big Men who had no way of bequeathing renown to their offspring. Let us repeat what we said in an earlier chapter: if feasting were all it took to produce hereditary inequality, there would have been no achievement-based societies left for anthropologists to study.

A Third Scenario: Debt Slavery

There is a third possible scenario for the establishment of rank society among Tibeto-Burman speakers, including both the Naga and the Kachin. Its premises are to be found in Leach’s description of Kachin marriage and the mayu-dama system.

In the 1940s a moderately well-to-do Kachin groom might have to give his bride’s lineage four head of cattle, plus valuables such as slit-gongs, swords and spears, coats and blankets, and pottery vessels. In many cases the haggling over bride-price went on for a long time, with negotiators using tally sticks to represent cattle and valuables.

Often a groom had to go into debt to pay for a bride. This was as true for wealthy grooms as for ordinary grooms, since bride-price was set higher for the former. One of the contradictions of Kachin logic was that bride-price was supposed to reflect the prominence of the bride’s family, while in practice it reflected what the bride’s family believed the groom could pay. A prominent groom could thus go even further into debt than a man of modest means.

It is no accident that the Kachin word
hka
meant both “debt” and “feud.” Although debts might be left unpaid for long periods, thereby allowing social relations to continue, failure to pay could eventually have repercussions.

In Charles Dickens’s England there were debtors’ prisons for those who failed to repay their creditors. The Kachin punishment was just as grim: debt slavery. Many Kachin, unable to repay their loans, had to sell themselves into bondage to work off such debts. Leach estimates that in days of old, up to 50 percent of the Kachin may have been
mayam,
or slaves, nearly all owned by the chiefs or village headmen who extended the loans. A rule similar to Raymond Kelly’s principle of social substitutability held a debtor’s whole lineage accountable for his failure to pay. This swelled the ranks of the mayam.

Slaves in societies such as the Kachin, to be sure, do not fit our stereotype of chattel slavery in the pre-1860 United States. Mayam status was more like that of an illegitimate child, or a poor son-in-law working off his bride service. Debt slaves were considered Kachins, but of a particularly low lineage. Some eventually worked off their debts or married into nonslave lineages.

We consider debt slavery a third scenario that might have brought about the inequality of lineages, both among the Kachin and (as we saw earlier) the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest. It is a scenario supporting Rousseau’s conclusion that the most unpleasant inequalities of human society were the result not of nature but of developments in society itself.

One of the strengths of the debt slave scenario is that it is based on events Leach actually witnessed. One question, however, remains: What would happen to slaves when society cycled from ranked to unranked? Leach reveals that some Kachin chiefs came to rely more on the loyalty of their personal slaves than on the loyalty of families from lower-ranked lineages. As gumsa society broke down, therefore, the most loyal slaves may have been assimilated into their owners’ extended kinsmen so that this close relationship could continue.

CYCLING AMONG THE KONYAK NAGA

Let us now go west from the Kachin hills and cross the border into Assam, north of the territory of the Ao and Lotha Naga. Here one encounters a land of forested hills, 4,000 feet above sea level, drenched with 160 inches of monsoonal rain between April and September. This part of Nagaland was the realm of the Konyak Naga.

The Konyak grew rice, millet, and taro and raised water buffalo, pigs, and a burly species of cattle called the mithan. They shared a number of institutions with their Ao and Angami neighbors: the morung, or men’s house, the taking of enemy heads, the building of prestige through the hosting of ritual feasts, and so on. They differed from the Ao and Angami in that, like the Kachin, their society had a long history of cycling between rank and egalitarian.

Such was the nature of cycling that some Konyak villages had a mixture of institutions from achievement-based and rank society. A visit to such a village was like seeing a snapshot taken during the transition from one social system to another.

Like many speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages, the Konyak lived in a cosmos peopled by spirits—some friendly, some malevolent—who were approachable through proper ritual. Their highest supernatural being, whose various regional names meant “Earth/Sky,” was equivalent to the highest nat of the Kachin. Portrayed as an immense Naga, this supreme spirit created Thunder and Lightning, Earth, humans, and rice. He was the ultimate guardian of the moral order, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the evil.

The Konyak were visited in the 1920s by
John
H. Hutton and James P. Mills. Anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf lived among them during the period 1936–1937 and returned in 1962 to see how their life had changed. Fürer-Haimendorf spent most of his time in Wakching, a village of 1,300 Naga, but he also visited 20 other villages, including Niaunu. These travels enabled him to see every stage in the transition from achievement-based to rank society.

The Konyak were divided into descent groups called
li
(“clans”), each led by an elder. All reckoned descent in the father’s line, and people had to marry outside their li. Villages were divided into residential wards, each of which built its own men’s house. Wakching was divided into five wards, ranging in size from 40 to 82 houses. Clans were spread among different wards, and some clans occupying the same ward shared a men’s house. The heads of the men’s houses inherited their position within each ward, and they collectively made up the village council.

The Konyak morung was easily the most impressive of all Naga men’s houses. It could be 84 feet long and 36 feet wide, with a porch extending out another 24 feet. The lintels and doorjambs were carved with elephants and tigers. Inside were bamboo bunks for the young men, all of whom slept there once they had reached a certain age. Three sides of the porch had benches that allowed older alumni to gather, without having to enter the boys’ dormitory. The morung built by the chief’s clan was particularly elegant, featuring slit-gongs, baskets of enemy heads, and a marimba whose notes summoned members to ritual.

Like the Kachin, the Konyak had two different modes of social organization. They used the term
thenkoh
for villages where, as Fürer-Haimendorf puts it, “one could live for a considerable time without being conscious of distinctions of rank.” They used the term
thendu
for villages where hereditarily ranked clans were clearly evident. Of the villages Fürer-Haimendorf knew best, Wakching was thenkoh and Niaunu was thendu.