The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (9 page)

A remaining all-too-familiar feature of states is that, even in the most egalitarian Scandinavian democracies, citizens are politically, economically, and socially unequal. Inevitably, any state has to have a few political leaders giving orders and making laws, and lots of commoners obeying those orders and laws. State citizens have different economic roles (as farmers, janitors, lawyers, politicians, shop clerks, etc.), and some of those roles carry higher salaries than do other roles. Some citizens enjoy higher social status than do other citizens. All idealistic efforts to minimize inequality within states—e.g., Karl Marx’s formulation of the communist ideal “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—have failed.

There could be no states until there was food production (beginning only around 9000 BC), and still no states until food production had been operating for enough millennia to build up the large, dense populations requiring state government. The first state arose in the Fertile Crescent around 3400 BC, and others then arose in China, Mexico, the Andes, Madagascar, and other areas over the following millennia, until today a world map shows the entire planet’s land area except for Antarctica divided into states. Even Antarctica is subject to partly overlapping territorial claims by seven nations.

Thus, before 3400 BC there were no states anywhere, and in recent times there have still been large areas beyond state control, operating under traditional simpler political systems. The differences between those traditional societies and the state societies familiar to us are the subject of this book. How should we classify and talk about the diversity of traditional societies themselves?

While every human society is unique, there are also cross-cultural patterns that permit some generalizations. In particular, there are correlated
trends in at least four aspects of societies: population size, subsistence, political centralization, and social stratification. With increasing population size and population density, the acquisition of food and other necessities tends to become intensified. That is, more food is obtained per acre by subsistence farmers living in villages than by small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, and still more is obtained per acre on the intensive irrigated plots cultivated by higher-density peoples and on the mechanized farms of modern states. Political decision-making becomes increasingly centralized, from the face-to-face group discussions of small hunter-gatherer groups to the political hierarchies and decisions by leaders in modern states. Social stratification increases, from the relative egalitarianism of small hunter-gatherer groups to the inequality between people in large centralized societies.

These correlations between different aspects of a society aren’t rigid: some societies of a given size have more intensified subsistence, or more political centralization, or more social stratification, than do others. But we need some shorthand for referring to the different types of societies emerging from these broad trends, while acknowledging the diversity within these trends. Our practical problem is similar to the problem faced by developmental psychologists discussing differences among individual people. While every human being is unique, there are still broad age-related trends, such that 3-year-olds are on the average different in many correlated respects from 24-year-olds. Yet age forms a continuum with no abrupt cut-offs: there is no sudden transition from being “like a 3-year-old” to being “like a 6-year-old.” And there are differences among people of the same age. Faced with these complications, developmental psychologists still find it useful to adopt shorthand categories such as “infant,” “toddler,” “child,” “adolescent,” “young adult,” etc., while recognizing the imperfections of these categories.

Social scientists similarly find it useful to adopt shorthand categories whose imperfections they understand. They face the added complication that changes among societies can be reversed, whereas changes in age classes can’t. Farming villages may revert to small hunter-gatherer bands under drought conditions, whereas a 4-year-old will never revert to being a 3-year-old. While most developmental psychologists agree on recognizing and naming the broadest categories of infant/child/adolescent/adult,
social scientists use numerous alternative sets of shorthand categories for describing variation among traditional societies, and some scientists become indignant at the use of any categories at all. In this book I shall occasionally use Elman Service’s division of human societies into four categories of increasing population size, political centralization, and social stratification: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. While these terms are now 50 years old and other terms have been proposed since then, Service’s terms have the advantage of simplicity: four terms to remember instead of seven terms, and single words instead of multi-word phrases. But please remember that these terms are just shorthand useful for discussing the great diversity of human societies, without pausing to reiterate the imperfections in the shorthand terms and the important variations within each category each time that the terms are used in the text.

The smallest and simplest type of society (termed by Service a band) consists of just a few dozen individuals, many of them belonging to one or several extended families (i.e., an adult husband and wife, their children, and some of their parents, siblings, and cousins). Most nomadic hunter-gatherers, and some garden farmers, traditionally lived at low population densities in such small groups. The band members are sufficiently few in number that everyone knows everyone else well, group decisions can be reached by face-to-face discussion, and there is no formal political leadership or strong economic specialization. A social scientist would describe a band as relatively egalitarian and democratic: members differ little in “wealth” (there are few personal possessions anyway) and in political power, except as a result of individual differences in ability or personality, and as tempered by extensive sharing of resources among band members.

Insofar as we can judge from archaeological evidence about the organization of past societies, probably all humans lived in such bands until at least a few tens of thousands of years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago. When Europeans began, especially after Columbus’s first voyage of AD 1492, to expand around the world and to encounter non-European peoples living in non-state societies, bands still occupied all or most of Australia and the Arctic, plus low-productivity desert and forest environments of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. Band societies that will frequently be discussed in this book include the !Kung of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, the Ache and Siriono Indians of South America,
the Andaman Islanders of the Bay of Bengal, the Pygmies of African equatorial forests, and Machiguenga Indian gardeners of Peru. All of the examples mentioned in the preceding sentence except the Machiguenga are or were hunter-gatherers.

Bands grade into the next larger and more complex type of society (termed by Service a tribe), consisting of a local group of hundreds of individuals. That’s still just within the group size limit where everyone can know everyone else personally and there are no strangers. For instance, in my high school of about 200 students all students and teachers knew each other by name, but that was impossible in my wife’s high school with thousands of students. A society of hundreds means dozens of families, often divided into kinship groups termed clans, which may exchange marriage partners with other clans. The higher populations of tribes than of bands require more food to support more people in a small area, and so tribes usually are farmers or herders or both, but a few are hunter-gatherers living in especially productive environments (such as Japan’s Ainu people and North America’s Pacific Northwest Indians). Tribes tend to be sedentary, and to live for much or all of the year in villages located near their gardens, pastures, or fisheries. However, Central Asian herders and some other tribal peoples practise transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.

In other respects tribes still resemble large bands—for instance, in their relative egalitarianism, weak economic specialization, weak political leadership, lack of bureaucrats, and face-to-face decision-making. I’ve watched meetings in New Guinea villages where hundreds of people sit on the ground, manage to have their say, and reach a conclusion. Some tribes have a “big man” who functions as a weak leader, but he leads only by his powers of persuasion and personality rather than by recognized authority. As an example of the limits of a “big man’s” powers, we shall see in
Chapter 3
how the ostensible followers of a leader named Gutelu of the New Guinea Dani tribe succeeded in thwarting Gutelu’s will and launching a genocidal attack that split Gutelu’s political alliance. Archaeological evidence of tribal organization, such as remains of substantial residential structures and settlements, suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been
widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia. Tribal societies that I’ll discuss in this book include Alaska’s Iñupiat, South America’s Yanomamo Indians, Afghanistan’s Kirghiz, New Britain’s Kaulong, and New Guinea’s Dani, Daribi, and Fore.

Tribes then grade into the next stage of organizational complexity, called a chiefdom and containing thousands of subjects. Such a large population, and the incipient economic specialization of chiefdoms, require high food productivity and the ability to generate and store food surpluses for feeding non-food-producing specialists, like the chiefs and their relatives and bureaucrats. Hence chiefdoms have built sedentary villages and hamlets with storage facilities and have mostly been food-producing (farming and herding) societies, except in the most productive areas available to hunter-gatherers, such as Florida’s Calusa chiefdom and coastal Southern California’s Chumash chiefdoms.

In a society of thousands of people it’s impossible for everyone to know everyone else or to hold face-to-face discussions that include everybody. As a result, chiefdoms confront two new problems that bands or tribes did not. First, strangers in a chiefdom must be able to meet each other, to recognize each other as fellow but individually unfamiliar members of the same chiefdom, and to avoid bristling at territorial trespass and getting into a fight. Hence chiefdoms develop shared ideologies and political and religious identities often derived from the supposedly divine status of the chief. Second, there is now a recognized leader, the chief, who makes decisions, possesses recognized authority, claims a monopoly on the right to use force against his society’s members if necessary, and thereby ensures that strangers within the same chiefdom don’t fight each other. The chief is assisted by non-specialized all-purpose officials (proto-bureaucrats) who collect tribute and settle disputes and carry out other administrative tasks, instead of there being separate tax collectors, judges, and restaurant inspectors as in a state. (A source of confusion here is that some traditional societies that have chiefs and are correctly described as chiefdoms in the scientific literature and in this book are nevertheless referred to as “tribes” in most popular writing: for instance, Indian “tribes” of eastern North America, which really consisted of chiefdoms.)

An economic innovation of chiefdoms is termed a redistributive economy: instead of just direct exchanges between individuals, the chief col
lects tribute of food and labor, much of which is redistributed to warriors, priests, and craftsmen who serve the chief. Redistribution is thus the earliest form of a system of taxation to support new institutions. Some of the food tribute is returned to the commoners, whom the chief has a moral responsibility to support in times of famine, and who work for the chief at activities like constructing monuments and irrigation systems. In addition to these political and economic innovations beyond the practices of bands and tribes, chiefdoms pioneered the social innovation of institutionalized inequality. While some tribes already have separate lineages, a chiefdom’s lineages are ranked hereditarily, with the chief and his family being at the top, commoners or slaves at the bottom, and (in the case of Polynesian Hawaii) as many as eight ranked castes in between. For members of higher-ranked lineages or castes, the tribute collected by the chief funds a better lifestyle in terms of food, housing, and special clothing and adornments.

Hence past chiefdoms can be recognized archaeologically by (sometimes) monumental construction, and by signs such as unequal distribution of grave goods in cemeteries: some bodies (those of chiefs and their relatives and bureaucrats) were buried in large tombs filled with luxury goods such as turquoise and sacrificed horses, contrasting with small unadorned graves of commoners. Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC. In modern times, just before the recent nearly universal imposition of state government control around the world, chiefdoms were still widespread in Polynesia, much of sub-Saharan Africa, and the more productive areas of eastern and southwestern North America, Central America, and South America outside the areas controlled by the Mexican and Andean states. Chiefdoms that will be discussed in this book include the Mailu Islanders and Trobriand Islanders of the New Guinea region, and the Calusa and Chumash Indians of North America. From chiefdoms, states emerged (from about 3400 BC onwards) by conquest or amalgamation under pressure, resulting in larger populations, often ethnically diverse populations, specialized spheres and layers of bureaucrats, standing armies, much greater economic specialization, urbanization, and other changes, to produce the types of societies that blanket the modern world.

Thus, if social scientists equipped with a time machine could have
surveyed the world at any time before about 9000 BC, they would have found everybody everywhere subsisting as hunter-gatherers, living in bands and possibly already in some tribes, without metal tools, writing, centralized government, or economic specialization. If those social scientists could have returned in the 1400s, at the time when the expansion of Europeans to other continents was just beginning, they now would have found Australia to be the sole continent still occupied entirely by hunter-gatherers, still living mostly in bands and possibly in some tribes. But, by then, states occupied most of Eurasia, northern Africa, the largest islands of western Indonesia, most of the Andes, and parts of Mexico and West Africa. There were still many bands, tribes, and chiefdoms surviving in South America outside the Andes, in all of North America, New Guinea, and the Arctic, and on Pacific islands. Today, the whole world except Antarctica is divided at least nominally into states, although state government remains ineffective in some parts of the world. The world regions that preserved the largest numbers of societies beyond effective state control into the 20th century were New Guinea and the Amazon.