The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (7 page)

A second behavior, already seen among the Eskimo, was the use of humor to prevent feelings of superiority. A hunter asking for help in hauling a magnificent kill to his camp would be told, “You think this skinny bag of bones is worth carrying?” No hunter was allowed to boast, and refusing to share would not have been tolerated.

Again we see one of the most basic premises of egalitarian society: If one wants to be well thought of, he will be generous. If he strays from this ideal, he will be reminded of it with humor. If he persists in not sharing, he will be actively disliked.

Unlike the foragers of Klasies River Mouth or Wadi Kubbaniya, the !Kung had an immediate return economy in which storage was actually discouraged, since it could lead to hoarding. When it came to the hxaro gift-giving system, however, delayed returns were expected.

Each !Kung had a series of partners with whom he exchanged gifts. According to anthropologist Pauline Wiessner, about 70 percent of these partners were relatives or in-laws, while 30 percent were unrelated persons, treated (and addressed) as if they were honorary kinsmen. One gave his partner a gift with the expectation that within two years he would reciprocate with a gift of equal value. Not to reciprocate would have been as reprehensible as not to share meat.

It was not the intrinsic value of the gift that mattered. The real value of hxaro was that it created a network of partners, often living up to 50 miles away, whose camps one could visit in times of scarcity. Whole families could visit other camps for up to half a year, sharing food and water, after which the visitors were allowed to build their own shelter and forage in their hosts’ n!ore.

The willingness of clanless foragers to host nonrelatives during lean years was presumably crucial to survival. Some scholars, especially those with a background in animal behavior, refer to such generosity as
altruism;
a few have even suggested that there might be a gene (or genes) for such behavior. We wonder, however, if there might not be an alternative way to interpret such hosting. We wonder if clanless hunters, forbidden by society from accumulating surplus food, may instead have been accumulating social obligations. Their alleged altruism, in other words, could be seen as a self-serving investment, a way of obligating their guests to host them in the future when their situations were reversed.

As for hxaro exchange, it is significant that the !Kung were forbidden to reciprocate with a gift more valuable than the one they had received. A hunter with many hxaro partners was greatly respected, but he was not allowed to shame his partners with gifts so large that they could not be matched. We mention this because in later chapters we will begin to encounter societies with clans that used lavish gifts to create the impression of inequality.

NAMESAKES

Hxaro was not the only system used by the !Kung to create networks of partners. There were also networks of
!gu!na,
“namesakes,” built on the premise that names were magic.

Among the Nyae Nyae !Kung, Lorna Marshall discovered 46 names for men and 41 for women. First-born children were often named for a grandparent of the same sex. So magic were names that if an unrelated person received the same name as someone’s sibling, that person would be treated as if he or she
were
that sibling. If one deliberately named one’s child after a distant relative or in-law, one was allowed to address all that namesake’s relatives by the same terms that would be used for the child’s relatives.

The network of name-partners among the Nyae Nyae extended 80 miles to the south, 60–80 miles to the east, and 115 miles to the north. Arriving at a distant camp, a visitor needed only to give his shared name to be welcomed by the family of his !gu!na.

Once again we see clanless foragers creating a network of mutual aid, cooperation, and food sharing far larger than their home territory. They did this not with expensive gifts but with language and the magic of the name.

The !Kung therefore show us one of the adaptive contradictions of clanless foraging society, expressed in these three points:

  1. Having no unit larger than an extended family allowed for great flexibility. As resources waxed and waned, camps could move and families could aggregate or disperse within their own n!ore as needed.

  2. On the other hand, there were times when survival depended on being able to leave one’s n!ore and seek the hospitality of unrelated neighbors. Under these conditions, having no kin group larger than the extended family put one at a disadvantage.

  3. The !Kung dealt with this contradiction by creating two extensive networks of honorary kinsmen: hxaro partners and !gu!na namesakes. For the !Kung, both networks were egalitarian. Later in this book, we will see agricultural societies turn both gifts and magic names into sources of inequality.

THE EASTERN HADZA: SETTING THE STAGE FOR LARGER SOCIAL UNITS

Lake Eyasi is a body of brackish water in Tanzania’s Great Rift Valley. To the east of the lake is a dry, rocky savanna with scattered baobab and acacia trees. Once, in an era of unspoiled environments, this savanna would have supported herds of elephants and rhinos, zebras and giraffes, and smaller game such as the eland, impala, and gazelle.

The Eastern Hadza were once 400 strong, occupying 1,000 square miles of the Lake Eyasi savanna. According to James Woodburn, who began studying them in 1958, the Hadza saw their world as divided into four quadrants, occupied by “the people of Sipunga Mountain,” “the people of Mangola River,” “the people of the West,” and “the people of the Rocks.” Each of these regions was home to 50–100 Hadza, but all social groups were extremely fluid. During part of the year, families were dispersed and lived in smaller camps. When the fruits of the cordia and salvadora bushes became ripe, families converged on these groves and lived in larger camps. Dry season camps tended to be larger because this was the season of big game, and everyone wanted to live near the most skilled hunters.

Because of this endless coming and going, some anthropologists consider the camp (rather than a permanent band) the only meaningful social unit for clanless foragers. An average Hadza camp had 18 adults, but camps could be as small as one hunter or as large as 100 people. The Hadza moved their camps for a multitude of reasons: to be near large, recently killed game; to abandon a camp where someone had died; to obtain wood for arrow shafts or poison for arrows; or to trade with other Hadza.

The nature of Hadza camps varied with the season. During the summer rains they might occupy rock shelters. In the dry season they lived outdoors in ephemeral huts or windbreaks. Their most substantial camps lay usually within a mile of water, often among groves of trees or protective rock outcrops. At these camps Hadza women made conical shelters thatched with grass, rarely spending more than two hours at the task. A young woman usually built her shelter close to the one occupied by her mother—close enough so that her husband could perform bride service, supplying meat to his mother-in-law, yet not so close that he would violate the custom of “mother-in-law avoidance.”

In addition to supplying his mother-in-law with meat, a young man was expected to give her long strings of bride-price beads. Good hunters, with two wives, needed twice the beads. If similar social obligations existed during the Ice Age, it would explain why so many seashells were turned into beads and traded over great distances.

Like the Eskimo and !Kung, the Hadza respected generosity and hospitality. None of the quadrants of their world were considered exclusive territories. Anyone could hunt, collect wild plants, or draw water anywhere. An individual living at a camp where he normally did not belong was called
huyeti,
“visitor,” but no one really objected to him. In fact, some visitors ingratiated themselves with their hosts by bringing them what they most desired: honey.

Although sharing was important to the Hadza, anthropologists Kristen Hawkes, James O’Connell, and Nicholas Blurton Jones point out that men were under more pressure to share than women. As with the !Kung, women engaged in low-risk plant collecting and kept most of the harvest for their family. Men engaged in high-risk big game hunting and were expected to share with everyone. Any big game killed would be presented to the whole camp; a refusal to do so would bring supernatural punishment and social retribution.

Game was eaten immediately because the Hadza, unlike some of the Ice Age foragers we saw earlier, did not smoke or store meat. Like the !Kung, they were immediate return strategists whose meat-sharing built social bonds. Meat and honey made up only 20 percent of the Hadza diet by weight, but no other foods did as much to strengthen the fabric of society.

Like the other foragers in this chapter, the Hadza had an egalitarian, consensus-based society in which leadership was noncoercive, really amounting to no more than the advice of a few respected senior men. The composition of larger Hadza camps, however, provides us with a possible scenario for the origins of lineages and clans.

Hadza women, as we have seen, built their huts close to their mothers’. Monogamous Hadza couples, in fact, were five times as likely to share a camp with the wife’s mother as with the husband’s. This means that a Hadza camp often consisted of a senior woman, her married daughters and their husbands, and her married granddaughters and their husbands. Woodburn points out that this social grouping has the same genealogical composition as a
matrilineage,
that is, a lineage whose descent is reckoned in the female line. In other words the occupants of some Hadza camps may have constituted the raw material out of which, under the right conditions, a lineage could have crystallized.

When a society feels the need for a large, multigenerational group of allies, lineages and clans can be an even better solution than the seal-sharing partners of the Netsilik or the name-sharing partners of the !Kung. We have mentioned the possibility that the !Kung may once have had larger social segments called !ku-si, membership in which was inherited. At certain times in the past, therefore, the genealogical groupings seen in large foraging camps may occasionally have turned into multigenerational social units.

In the case of the !Kung, such larger units might later have dissolved back into their constituent extended families when conditions changed for the worse—when, for example, the !Kung were driven into the Kalahari Desert by more powerful neighbors. Archaeologists should therefore be alert to the possibility that some Ice Age foragers developed lineages or clans for a time, only to lose them when conditions deteriorated.

THE PRESERVATION OF EQUALITY IN SMALL-SCALE FORAGING SOCIETY

In this chapter we have looked exclusively at societies whose largest unit was the extended family. All used social pressure, disapproval, and ridicule to prevent anyone from developing a sense of superiority.

Such attempts to keep everyone equal provide a notable contrast to the behavior of our nearest living relatives, the great apes. Humans share 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, and chimpanzees are anything but egalitarian. They have alpha males who physically abuse their rivals and beta males who bully everyone but the alphas.

One of the goals of anthropology is to understand the differences in behavior between apes and men, in the hope of learning what it means to be human. In a now-classic study, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins proposed that sex, food, and defense of the group were the three basic needs for both apes and early humans. What differed, Sahlins argued, was the priority placed on each need.

For apes the highest priority is sex, followed by food and defense. Chimps are extremely promiscuous, and males compete constantly for mates. Males are willing to share portions of monkeys that they have killed, but they do not like to share females. Strong hormones drive males to fight viciously over the troop’s alpha position and the females who go with it.

For human foragers, on the other hand, food is the first priority, followed by defense and sex. Marriage—a food-getting partnership rather than a hormone-driven sexual liaison—has replaced the promiscuity of ape society. For example, we have seen that two Eskimo husbands could share the same wife without displaying the jealousy and violence of male chimpanzees.

Precisely because human marriage is an economic partnership, it showed great flexibility from the beginning. No traditional forager would accept the argument that marriage must be restricted to one man/one woman in order to “preserve the family.” Traditional Eskimos, for example, knew that a family could be one man/one woman, or one man/two women, or one woman/two men, or even two men/two women. Far from threatening the institution of the family, this flexibility strengthened it by allowing it to adjust to any economic situation.

That is not to say that male foragers never competed in any aspect of sexual activity. There was one arena in which they competed, but it was out of focus to them because of their cosmology.

Anthropologist William S. Laughlin once lived with a group of 78 traditional Eskimo hunters in Alaska’s Anaktuvuk Pass. Part of his research included a study of their blood antigens. The group was led by a senior male, described by Laughlin as a superior caribou hunter. Antigen studies showed that this man had fathered seven of his group’s children, who in turn produced ten grandchildren, for a total of 17 living descendants. In other words, this one respected senior male had contributed his genes to some 20 percent of his group’s population.

Evolutionary biologists would say that this caribou hunter had competed with others to pass on his genes, and that he succeeded admirably. It is doubtful, however, that he was even aware of competing. To him, each baby born to his group would have been the reincarnated spirit of an ancestor.

This Anaktuvuk anecdote returns us to this question: Just how much of human behavior is controlled by our genes? Fortunately, we now know the answer: a great deal less than hard-core evolutionary biologists claim but probably more than most anthropologists want to admit.