Cannibals and Kings (12 page)

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 singing the praises of their
mumis
, the generation of pacified Siuai call them “warriors” and “killers of men and pigs.”

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.

The larger and denser the population, the larger the redistributive network and the more powerful the re-distributor war chief. Under certain circumstances, the exercise of power by the redistributor and his closest followers on the one side and by the ordinary food producers on the other became so unbalanced that for all intents and purposes the redistributor chiefs constituted the principal coercive force in social life. When this happened, contributions to the central store ceased to be voluntary contributions. They became taxes. Farmlands and natural resources ceased to be elements of rightful access. They became dispensations. And redistributors ceased to be chiefs. They became kings.

To illustrate these momentous transformations in the context of a small preindustrial state, I shall call upon John Beattie’s description of the Bunyoro. Ruled over by a hereditary ruler called the
mukama
, the Bunyoro numbered about 100,000, occupied an area of 5,000 square miles of that portion of the central lake area of East Africa which is now known as Uganda, and earned their living primarily by raising millet and bananas. The Bunyoro were organized into a feudal but nonetheless authentic state society. Their
mukama
was a king, not a mere redistributor chief. The privilege of using all lands and natural resources was a dispensation granted by the
mukama
to a dozen or so chiefs, who then passed on the dispensation to the commoners. In return for this dispensation, quantities of food, handicrafts, and labor services were funneled up through the power hierarchy into the
mukama
’s headquarters. The
mukama
in turn directed the use of these goods and services on behalf of state enterprises. Superficially, the
mukama
appears to be just another “great provider” redistributor chief. In Beattie’s words: