The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (30 page)

The potential for achieved inequality in Hidatsa society lay in the fact that large families could work hard, grow more crops, trap more eagles, trade more war bonnets for horses, and acquire more life force through the purchase of sacred bundles. There was a limit, however, to how much wealth or status one could accumulate. For example, there was constant pressure to give away your possessions to others, and if you began to act superior, you would be ridiculed even by your own relatives. Bravery and ritual expertise were admired, but in the end your task was to live out your destiny, following the vision that the spirits had allowed you to see.

Two-Spirit People

In Plains society, as we have seen, children as young as eight years old were encouraged to seek a personal vision through fasting and pain. For most young people, a window opened into the spirit world and set them on a gender-specific course. Men in buckskin leggings stole enemy horses, killed buffalo, and counted coup. Women in buckskin skirts hoed gardens, made buffalo hides into robes, and cooked their family’s meals.

Once in a while a Hidatsa youth began dreaming of a spirit called “Village-Old-Woman.” This dream was considered his vision, and it meant that his destiny was to be a “two-spirit person.” For the rest of his life he would dress in women’s clothing and perform women’s work. He might set up housekeeping with a man and even adopt children.

Anthropologist Raymond DeMallie estimates that there might have been a dozen two-spirit people in a Hidatsa village of 100. Such individuals entered the women’s age-grade system and often became respected members of the Holy Women society. They were, in fact, the only Hidatsa allowed to participate in every ceremony. In the social logic of the Plains, two-spirit people had an air of mystery about them and were thought to have a closer relationship with the supernatural world.

Two-spirit people were, of course, not unique to the Hidatsa. They were a widespread feature of Plains society, from the Blackfoot of Alberta and the Assiniboine of Saskatchewan to the Mandan of North Dakota, the Ponca and Lakota of South Dakota, and the Arapaho of Colorado. In fact, it has been estimated that more than 100 Native American societies included men who dressed and lived as women. Perhaps a third as many societies are estimated to have had women who dressed and lived as men.

In the Blackfoot language the word for two-spirit men meant simply “acts-like-a-woman.” The Blackfoot believed that such a man was possessed by a unique spiritual force. Far from being shunned, DeMallie reveals, two-spirit men “were in demand as wives because of their physical strength in carrying out womanly duties and for their artistic abilities.” Sometimes a married man, believing that he could support a second wife, added a two-spirit person to his household.

We have already seen that marriage among the Eskimo was an economic partnership, expressed in four varieties: a man and a woman, a man and two women, a woman and two men, and two men sharing two wives. To these we can now add (1) one man and a two-spirit person and (2) one man, one woman, and one two-spirit person, giving us at least six varieties of marriage among the indigenous people of the New World.

Feeling that two-spirit people were better suited for women’s work, the Mandan did not ask them to go along on raids. The Arapaho believed them to have their own special type of life force. Ponca youths had dreams in which the moon asked them to choose between a bow and arrow and a woman’s pack strap. Those who chose the pack strap were destined to dress and live as women.

For their part, some Plains women had visions of themselves as men. Among the Blackfoot, for example, there were “manly hearted women” who joined men’s raiding parties, stole their enemies’ horses, dressed in men’s clothing, and even took wives. This behavior gives us a seventh type of marriage: two women, one of whom was manly hearted.

It is significant that in no Plains society were transgendered individuals looked down upon or ostracized. Their destiny had been predetermined by the spirit world, and Plains society created a place for them. They were often prized for their hard work, respected for their deeper understanding of the sacred, or admired for their craftsmanship.

All this changed, of course, when Euro-American missionaries reached the Plains. They branded the two-spirit people “berdaches,” a corruption of the Spanish term
berdajes,
“male prostitutes.” Countless two-spirit people were persecuted and driven into hiding.

The Plains Indians’ view of two-spirit people was that they owed their way of life to forces beyond their control rather than to human choice. This view is closer to that of today’s social scientists than was the pejorative attitude of the missionaries. No Plains society argued that in order to preserve the institution of marriage it had to be restricted to one man and one woman.

BALANCE AND LONG-TERM STABILITY

There are lessons to be learned from the traditional communities of the Tewa, Hopi, Mandan, and Hidatsa. All four groups struck a balance between personal ambition and community spirit. These ethnic groups created a socially accepted way for talented individuals to rise to positions of respect while working to prevent the development of a hereditary nobility.

In many parts of the ancient world, archaeologists can point to periods when society remained remarkably stable for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Often, following further investigation, that stability turns out to have been the product of achievement-based, politically autonomous village societies.

A group’s initial attempts to create hereditary nobility, on the other hand, could bring on great instability. The contradictions in social logic between privilege and equality could result in years of oscillation and even bloodshed, as we will see in the next chapter.

III

Societies That Made Inequality Hereditary

TEN

The Rise and Fall of Hereditary Inequality in Farming Societies

Leadership in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and in the Southwestern pueblos and Plains villages of North America was traditionally based on achievement. Those societies had no hereditary aristocracy. Mandan leaders could sell their sacred bundles to their sons, but they could not present them with noble titles in the manner of Nootka chiefs.

The archaeological record tells us that at various times in the past, a number of achievement-based societies must have altered their social logic to allow for hereditary privilege. Unfortunately, archaeology shows us the results but not the logic itself; to reconstruct the latter, we must turn to studies of living societies. In this chapter we begin with a village that shows us how one ambitious subclan tried to become its society’s hereditary elite. To do so, it had to convince rival subclans of its right to intellectual property that had previously been shared.

AUTHORITY IN THE VILLAGE OF AVATIP

The Sepik River flows east through Papua New Guinea and then turns north and empties into the Bismarck Sea. Along the lower Sepik and its tributaries, clearings open to reveal the gardens, hamlets, and villages of the yam-growing Abelam, the farmers and fishermen of the Iatmul tribe, and their neighbors the Manambu, just to mention a few.

The Abelam had a classic Big Man society. The Iatmul worked feverishly to accumulate shell valuables. The Manambu, however, were different. Their level of surplus production was so low that even with the help of kinsmen, one could rarely amass enough shells and pigs to become a Big Man.

In the 1970s anthropologist Simon Harrison came to live in Avatip, a dispersed community of roughly 1,600 Manambu. He discovered a society with several paths to leadership. First, there were secular political leaders who had achieved respect for their work ethic, hunting prowess, strength, generosity, and debating skills. Second, there were ritual leaders who had been initiated through successively higher levels of sacred knowledge. In the past there had been a third path to renown through head-hunting and warfare, activities predictably suppressed by colonial authorities.

Individuals in Avatip were grouped into lineages, lineages were grouped into subclans, and subclans were grouped into clans. Political leaders were drawn from the ranks of clan elders and possessed only secular power; they rose to prominence by winning debates against rivals. Ritual authority, on the other hand, lay in the hands of men called
simbuks,
each of whom was the head of a
laki
(one ceremonial division of a ritual cult).

Each simbuk desired to pass on the office to his oldest son in order to preserve all his cult’s ritual secrets. Such a move was predicated on the son’s passing all levels of initiation. If those hurdles had not been passed, the order of succession was to the simbuk’s younger brother or, if none existed, to his sister’s son. Even when they were successful at keeping ritual office within the family, simbuks had little secular power.

Subclans, of which there were 16, were the most dynamic units in Avatip society. Each subclan built its own men’s house, featuring big wooden posts, beams, spires, and slit-gongs. Every object stored in the men’s house embodied an ancestral spirit. Inside the building, men sat at one of three hearths, depending on whether they had been initiated into the first, second, or third level of sacred knowledge.

One of the greatest sources of tension in Avatip society was the rivalry between secular and ritual leaders. Subclans struggled to grow in population, because if their numbers declined it became harder to win debates. Secular leaders, who battled for years to achieve fame as debaters, envied the simbuks who inherited their office while still in their 20s, an age when most debaters were still nonentities.

Occasionally a simbuk would pick up debating skills, becoming a leader in both the secular and ritual spheres. Such men were so envied that they ran the risk of being murdered. For their part, some secular debaters took advantage of disputes in ritual succession, usurping a simbuk office to which they were not entitled.

Soon after doing this, one such usurper announced that he had just discovered three previously unknown ancestors in his genealogy. These ancestors were used as justification for declaring that the junior section of his lineage (to which he belonged) should become a separate lineage under a new name. This strategy, combined with population growth, was one way for a junior lineage to achieve parity with a senior lineage.

Any attempt by a lineage or subclan to improve its position provoked a debate. Such contests were held on formal debating grounds near the men’s house (
Figure 24
). There, men from two rival subclans faced each other across a vine boundary. Each subclan used an overturned canoe as a drum; each also erected a series of sticks, spears, and arrows representing important ancestors. The women of each subclan danced and prepared food for the participants.

Each debater held a bundle of magical cordyline leaves while he spoke, throwing one leaf to the ground to dramatize each point he was making. As long as he held the leaves, he could not be interrupted; when the leaves were all on the ground, the debater could be heckled. When tempers flared, onlookers used humor to prevent violence.

While secular leadership required oratorical skills, ritual leadership required a prodigious memory. It also employed a principle with which we are already familiar: Names are magic.

All the men and women of an Avatip subclan considered themselves the namesakes of mythical ancestors. The names themselves were not secret, but the myths they referred to were. Each subclan “owned” between 1,000 and 2,000 names, the total of its past, present, and future members. For the entire community of Avatip, that could mean an estimated 32,000 names. Each subclan jealously guarded its names and tried to grow in numbers so that it could own more and more names over time.

During Harrison’s stay at Avatip, the largest and most powerful subclan was the Maliyaw. This subclan comprised 246 members, or 15 percent of the community, the result of three generations of deliberate population growth. The Maliyaw had six highly acclaimed orators, ranging from 40 to 70 years old. For four decades they had been aggressively debating the ownership of disputed names, gradually winning by superiority of numbers.

The goal of the Maliyaw was nothing short of the monopolization of all names, and hence all ritual authority. They usurped several positions of genealogical seniority. They then attempted to revise the genealogical record to legitimize their usurpation. They co-opted the ancestors of a mythical village once claimed by their rivals, the Nanggwundaw subclan. The Nanggwundaw objected, so the Maliyaw debated them and won. When one Nanggwundaw orator collapsed and died, the Maliyaw claimed to have killed him by sorcery. In their own words, their aim was to “tread other subclans underfoot.”

The Maliyaw were out to eliminate the traditional Avatip separation of secular and ritual authority. Their goal was to unite the roles of political and ritual leader and create an office for which only men born into the Maliyaw subclan would be eligible. All the other 15 subclans, for their part, were trying to keep the Maliyaw from succeeding.