The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (17 page)

THE ENGA TRIBE: “ONE PIG AND ONE PIG ONLY”

One of the longest and most complex histories of competitive trading and feasting is that described by anthropologist Pauline Wiessner and her colleague Akii Tumu, a member of the Enga tribe. The story began 9–12 human generations ago when the sweet potato was introduced to the Enga, and the tribe’s population increased from 20,000 to 100,000 in roughly 220 years.

Like so many New Guinea tribes, the Enga were organized into clans that reckoned descent from a common male ancestor. Some men were described as
kamongo,
Big Men, having achieved renown by mediating disputes, giving speeches, and manipulating trade in shells, feathers, aromatic oils, ceremonial drums, and pigs.

Sweet potato gardening increased the women’s workload but also raised their value in the eyes of ambitious men. Now the pigs that created prestige for the men were fattened on sweet potatoes grown by the women. As populations grew, new ceremonies and exchange systems were spun off.

An ancient initiation ritual called the
kepele
eventually evolved into a cult honoring the ancestors, and then into a major ceremonial exchange system. Because one of the kepele’s goals was to unify the Enga tribe and integrate it with its neighbors, great pains were taken to prevent anyone from giving gifts too large to be reciprocated. The equality of all participants in kepele was expressed in the obligation to contribute “one pig and one pig only.” Kepele, in other words, counterbalanced some of the intense competition that took place at the Big Man level.

Another institution, slowly evolving, was the
tee
cycle. The tee originally began as a mechanism for wealth accumulation, financing bride-price and funerary gifts, by tapping into valuables that circulated beyond the immediate kin group. But as the population grew and the level of tribal warfare increased, the tee came to be used as a way to accumulate valuables for war reparations. An unanticipated consequence of the latter move was that some groups began engaging in war just to avail themselves of the generous reparations.

Since the goal of these new battles was wealth rather than revenge, no one really wanted to die in them. Wars became increasingly ritual, and the reparations increasingly involved pigs rather than land and crops. From 1915 through 1945 the Enga came to realize that killing pigs was better than killing people, and the tee gradually became an exchange cycle.

At its peak the cycle involved more than 375 clans. The first would provide its trading partners to the west with pigs, pearl shells, axes, salt, oil, and edible flightless birds called cassowaries. These items would be passed westward to a second clan, then to a third, and so on. The last clan to receive the items launched a west-to-east countercycle. Half the pigs they received would be butchered, and the cooked pork was then sent east to the very people from whom they had received the original pigs.

Australian authorities were naturally happy to see warfare decline. The Enga tribe, for its part, had managed to preserve the dual values of equality and delayed reciprocity, even as its Big Men were creating differences in prestige.

THE MT. HAGEN TRIBES: “I’LL SEE YOUR ONE PIG AND RAISE YOU TWO”

In the highlands of New Guinea, just east of the Enga and west of the Chimbu, live the tribes of the Mt. Hagen region. In the 1960s roughly 60,000 Melpa tribespeople occupied 530 square miles. Their neighbors, the Gawigl, numbered 30,000. The women of Mt. Hagen, described in an important study by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, tended gardens and raised the pigs that constituted the family’s major source of wealth. Their men cleared the forest, dug drainage ditches, and made war on their enemies. Men also participated in a spectacular exchange system called
moka,
which was studied by anthropologist Andrew Strathern.

Like the tee cycle of the Enga, moka almost certainly began as a way of creating wealth for war reparations. With the suppression of war by the Australian government, moka surged in importance as a way for men to compete without human casualties. Moka, however, did not admonish men to give one pig and one pig only. It dared men to say, “I’ll see your one pig and raise you two.” It turned exchange into a high-stakes game, at the end of which someone would fold and someone would emerge with renown.

Like the Chimbu, men in the Mt. Hagen region climbed a ladder of prestige. About 15 percent of the population wound up as unproductive “rubbish men” who attached themselves to Big Men as errand boys. Many rubbish men never married, because their kinsmen considered them such losers that they would not contribute to their purchase of a wife.

Ordinary men, usually monogamous and at least minimally involved in trade, made up 70 percent of the population. The remaining 15 percent were Big Men, who averaged between two and three wives and were very successful at trade, controlling almost all the valuables referred to colloquially as “shell money.”

At roughly ten years of age, all boys left their families and went to live in a communal men’s house. This circular, dormitory-like structure was almost certainly an outgrowth of the bachelors’ huts of earlier foraging societies. Once they had joined the men’s house, boys’ ritual lives would be very different from that of their sisters. From that point on they would spend less time with women, because such contact could deplete their life force. For their part, the women lived in oval longhouses with two doorways, one for women and children and one for the pigs they nurtured as a source of wealth.

In the good old days, Big Men led raids against enemy villages. During the subsequent phase of peacemaking and reparations, the killers presented the victims’ group with live pigs, cooked pork, fruits, cassowary eggs, and shell valuables. The recipients of these reparations would then return gifts of equivalent value, plus an additional amount, like the “vigorish” of modern loan sharks. It was this additional amount that was referred to as moka. The victors would accept the moka and return it with yet more vigorish. This back-and-forth “I’ll see you and raise you” was called “building a road of pigs between us,” and it was intended to prevent counterattacks.

With the suppression of warfare, ceremonial trade in shell valuables, feathers, salt, stone axes, animal fur, and red ocher escalated, always including moka. A man might give his trading partner two mother-of-pearl shells and a pig; the recipient gave back eight to ten pearl shells and shared the cooked meat of the pig with others. A man who received baby pigs might give back fully grown pigs or sides of cooked pork (a kind of “value added” pig). One gained prestige by finally giving a gift so big that it could not be returned with moka.

Eventually the Big Men of Mt. Hagen began wearing one bamboo “tally stick” for every event at which they had given a moka of eight to ten shells.
Figure 9
shows a Big Man wearing long strings of tally sticks, called
omak,
communicating to everyone that he is a man of renown. Big men were skilled at timing their gifts and very persuasive at convincing their kinsmen to help them accumulate resources. However, they had no authority to give commands and no way to enforce them. Nor could the sons of Big Men inherit their fathers’ prestige; they had to earn it on their own.

Andrew Strathern discovered, however, that while Big Man was not a hereditary position, it certainly helped if one’s father was a role model. Out of his sample of 88 Big Men, 49 (or 56 percent) had fathers who were Big Men. Even more significantly, of the 32 who were considered truly major Big Men, 23 (or 72 percent) had fathers who were Big Men.

After proudly wearing his omak in life, a Big Man received special treatment at death. His kinsmen flexed his corpse by tying his hands and legs, placing him on a platform for a day. They then buried him underground with an offering of shells and feathers. Later on they exhumed his skull and erected a shrine pole to him as an important ancestor. The shrine where his skull was kept became a place where would-be Big Men performed rituals. A village whose most prominent Big Man had died was temporarily directionless. No one doubted that he had been killed by witchcraft.

FIGURE 9.
   A Big Man of the Melpa tribe, New Guinea, stares down a rival entrepreneur. Before him is a display of pearl shell valuables, arranged on presentation disks of hardened resin. In the 1960s a man who gave away eight to ten of these shells, trumping his rival’s gift of two shells and a pig, was entitled to a bamboo tally stick called an
omak.
This Big Man has more than 50 omak hanging from his neck, identifying him as a person of great renown.

Ritual Buildings

One of a Mt. Hagen Big Man’s greatest contributions was to organize his kinsmen to build a
moka pene,
or grassy plaza, for ceremonial exchange. The moka pene was a cleared area bordered with casuarina trees and magical cordyline plants, and it often served as the beginning of a long row of ritual buildings and spaces. At the head of the moka pene the Big Man directed the construction of a ceremonial mound, and beyond that a ritual men’s house, different from the dormitory where young men slept. Behind this ritual men’s house was a hut where pigs could be sacrificed. Finally, at the opposite end of the ceremonial alignment from the moka pene lay a clan cemetery. Magical stones were buried in this cemetery, and its periphery was planted with trees that symbolized ancestors.

Let us consider the implications of the alignment consisting of a moka pene, a ritual mound, a ceremonial men’s house, a sacrificial hut, and a cemetery with sacred trees and magical stones. Almost any archaeologist coming upon it would consider it a “ceremonial complex” and assume that its construction had been directed by the hereditary leaders of a society with high levels of inequality. In reality it was the creation of a society whose leaders had achieved renown but possessed no real authority. That society received crucial support from its ancestors, invisible betas who were now in a position to lobby the celestial alphas on behalf of their descendants. Prevented from collecting enemy heads to bring their village good fortune, the Big Men of Mt. Hagen were at least able to earn renown through moka and, in some cases, to have their own skulls become objects of veneration.

ACHIEVING RENOWN IN ASSAM: THE ANGAMI NAGA

Assam is India’s easternmost province. Its borderland with Burma (modern Myanmar) is an area of forested mountains where a variety of tribes, mostly speaking Tibeto-Burman languages, once supported themselves by raising rice, millet, cattle, and pigs. Identifying themselves with names such as Angami, Lhota, Ao, Rengma, Sema, and Konyak, these hill people were referred to generically as the Naga. Today they belong to a separate nation called Nagaland.

While they shared no history with the people of New Guinea, Naga societies displayed many behaviors similar to those we have just discussed. Many lived in autonomous villages, were divided into clans, built dormitory-style men’s houses, ambushed enemies and brought back their heads, and ascended a ladder of renown by funding a series of increasingly prestigious rituals. Some of the most impressive rituals involved the hauling of multi-ton stones to villages, where they would be set up as permanent monuments.

It was through head-hunting that life force was accumulated by Naga villages. Life force was something that passed from humans into the rice and millet they grew, then into the humans and animals who ate the crops. That life force could be recovered later, when animals were sacrificed or enemies beheaded. Warriors who returned to their village with enemy heads underwent rituals of purification and then were allowed to wear insignia of prestige. The Sema Naga awarded the head-taker a boar-tusk collar. The Rengma and Lhota let him wear clothes of special cloth. The Konyak allowed him to wear special tattoos and a pendant in the shape of a trophy head.

The final resting place of an enemy head varied by tribe. The Angami buried the heads in the earth with their faces downward; the Konyak and Ao kept the heads in their men’s houses; the Lhota, Rengma, and Sema displayed the heads in a tree near the edge of the village. A man who had beheaded no one was considered such a wimp that he had trouble getting a wife.

We will focus here on the Angami Naga, who lived near the Burmese border, south of the Rengma, Lhota, and Sema. Angami villages were defended with walls and ditches. Each clan had its own men’s house, and often its own fortifications. The clans, which reckoned descent in the male line, sometimes bickered until they split in two. In spite of losses to warfare and fissioning, however, clans worked hard to keep from shrinking or going extinct, even adopting outsiders if necessary. Though they quarreled with each other, the clans in a village would come together to fight other villages or ethnic groups.

The Angami went to battle with five-foot spears of sago palm, shields made from elephant hide, and a machete-like knife called a
dao.
Each warrior also carried a bag filled with
panjis,
or sharpened bamboo spikes. Retreating after a raid, he would mine the trail behind him with panjis to impale the feet of pursuers.