The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (31 page)

FIGURE 24.
   The formal debating ground of the village of Avatip, New Guinea. Here, during the 1970s, rival subclans debated the ownership of sacred ancestral names. The men from two subclans faced each other across a vine boundary. Each subclan used an overturned canoe as a drum; each erected a series of sticks, spears, and arrows to represent totemic ancestors. The debaters held bundles of magical cordyline leaves, throwing one leaf to the ground to drive home each point. The Maliyaw subclan hoped to monopolize all sacred names, making it Avatip’s de facto elite.

Owing to interference by colonial authorities, it seemed unlikely that this attempt to create a permanent elite would bear fruit. Had the Maliyaw succeeded, however, they would have become even more envied than the Bear clan of Old Oraibi. Even the Bear clan, while providing most of Oraibi’s leaders, was not able to co-opt all the other clans’ rituals.

Hereditary Rank and Social Logic

Harrison’s study of Avatip reinforces one of Rousseau’s most important conclusions: inequality results from people’s efforts to be thought of and treated as superior. Whatever the supporting role of factors such as population growth, intensive agriculture, and a beneficent environment, hereditary inequality does not occur without active manipulation of social logic by human agents. The privileges the Maliyaw wanted would have to be taken away from their fellow subclans. To endure, they would eventually have to be justified by changes in cosmology—attributing them, for example, to legendary ancestors or supernatural spirits.

We do not believe that Avatip was an isolated case. We suspect that prehistory is full of cases where one segment of society manipulated itself into a position of superiority; the problem for archaeologists is finding a way to document the process. We also suspect that debates such as those of the Avatip are the preindustrial forerunner of the political campaign.

In the pages that follow we look at an Asian society that saw elite privileges created, overthrown, and periodically reinstated. The anthropologist who witnessed this repetitive cycle has identified some of the changes in social logic for us.

THE KACHIN OF HIGHLAND BURMA

We looked in previous chapters at the traditional Ao and Angami Naga of India’s Assam province. Across the border in Burma (modern Myanmar) lived their neighbors, called the Kachin. All three groups spoke languages of the Tibeto-Burman family.

As it happens, Naga and Kachin are generic terms for diverse groups of societies, some of which had hereditary rank and some of which did not. To complicate matters further, some Kachin societies had a history of shifting back and forth between hereditary privilege and equality. Archaeologists refer to such repeated shifts as “cycling.”

The world first learned of Kachin cycling from anthropologist Edmund Leach, who spent time in the northern Burmese district of Hpalang during the early 1940s. The Kachin themselves used the term
gumlao
to refer to societies in which all social units were considered equal. When such units became ranked relative to one another, they used the term
gumsa.

The key unit involved was one that reckoned descent in the father’s line. The Kachin themselves called this unit a
htinggaw,
meaning “of one household.” Leach refers to it as a lineage.

There may once have been more than 300,000 Kachin living in the hills of northern Burma. Hpalang lay 5,800 feet above sea level in forested hills receiving 120 to 150 inches of rain a year. The Kachin cleared patches in the forest, growing rice, millet, buckwheat, yams, and taro by
taungya,
or slash-and-burn agriculture. Taungya is called a long-fallow system because new land must be constantly cleared, while old fields are given 12 to 15 years to regain their fertility. The Kachin also raised zebu (humped) cattle, water buffalo, pigs, and chickens. The meat of the larger animals, however, was eaten only after the latter had been sacrificed during ritual, and at such times many guests shared in the feasting. These ritual feasts resembled the ones we saw among the Angami Naga.

In the cosmology of Hpalang, the world had been created by a bisexual deity named Chyanun-Woishun. This creator was reincarnated in spirit form in Shadip, the most powerful of all the
nats,
or supernatural spirits. Shadip was both the chief of the “earth spirits”
(ga nats)
and the parent of all “sky spirits”
(mu nats).

The youngest of the sky spirits was Madai. Because they themselves practiced
ultimogeniture,
a system in which the youngest son inherits all property, the Kachin knew that his youth made Madai the most important of Shadip’s offspring. In their logic, this cosmological premise was used to justify chiefly ultimogeniture when the Kachin were in the rank, or gumsa, mode of their cycle.

Madai’s daughter, the spirit Hpraw Nga, married a human being. This made her husband the ancestor of the first Kachin chief. When the Kachin were in their rank mode, this cosmological premise validated the lofty position of the chiefly lineage. It allowed chiefs to sacrifice animals directly to Madai, and through him to the supreme earth spirit Shadip.

Such sacrifices were considered the ongoing payment of a bride-price to Madai’s celestial lineage, since he had given his daughter in marriage to humankind. This relationship between Madai (a highly ranked nat) and his son-in-law (a human) supported another principle of Kachin social logic: The lineage giving the bride was seen as superior to the lineage receiving the bride. Bride-givers were called
mayu,
and bride-takers were called
dama.

When the Kachin were in their gumlao, or egalitarian, mode, they kept the marital playing field level in the following way. Men of lineage A married women of lineage B. Men of lineage B married women of lineage C. Men of lineage C married women of lineage A, and so on. Thus no lineage was ever left in a permanently inferior position.

Another part of Hpalang cosmology, however, justified rank society: Storm, the daughter of the sky nat Thunder, married an orphan human of lowly status. Her husband then became the ancestor of all low-ranking Kachin lineages. As a result, all members of those lineages had to make preliminary offerings to Storm before they could even think of sacrificing animals to Thunder. And they could not sacrifice directly to Madai or Shadip at all.

Human ancestors, of course, also played a role in this cosmology. The ancestors of every lineage became
masha nats,
“ancestor spirits,” and every household had shrines to them. Ancestor spirits were thought to intercede with the celestial nats on behalf of their descendants. When the Kachin were in rank mode, their chief had two household shrines, one for his human ancestors and one for Madai. Lower-ranked households, on the other hand, had only one shrine, at which they supplicated or scolded their human ancestors before making sacrifices to less-powerful nats.

The animal sacrifices of the Kachin, called
nat galaw,
or “spirit making,” were built on the age-old principle of reciprocal gift-giving. One sacrificed to a nat to put him in one’s debt, expecting him to return the favor. The nat took only the
nsa,
“breath or essence,” from the sacrificed animal, leaving the meat to be shared by humans at a feast. When the animal was the size of a water buffalo or zebu bull, it could feed a large crowd of guests and bring prestige to the host for his generosity.

When the Kachin were in rank mode, the ritual required an additional step: one hind leg from every animal sacrificed was given to the hereditary chief. This act was a form of tribute, justified by the chief’s genealogical relationship to Madai. The high nat partook of the essence of the animal, while the chief’s family ate the meat. As some Kachin expressed it, they were ruled by “thigh-eating chiefs.”

The chief often used his house to entertain distinguished visitors. This justified calling upon his followers to help build and repair his house, much the way clans repaired their men’s houses in egalitarian societies.

When a respected man sacrificed animals and used the meat for a feast, it was commemorated in ways reminiscent of the Angami Naga. The host might create a circular dance ground 45 to 60 feet in diameter. In front of his house he set up a sacrificial post. This post was decorated with symbols of the nat being honored by the sacrifice, and the skulls of the sacrificed animals were hung there. When the chief himself hosted a major celebration called a
manau,
he sometimes commemorated it by erecting a stone monument. The chief was not seeking to achieve renown, since he had already been born to privilege. Instead, like the Nootka and Tlingit chiefs, he was seeking to reconfirm the high rank of his lineage by meeting everyone’s lofty expectations.

FIGURE 25.
   In the early twentieth century, the Kachin of highland Burma oscillated between (1) egalitarian society with achievement-based leadership and (2) rank society with hereditary chiefs. When a village was in its
gumsa,
or rank mode, the Kachin built their chief a large house like the one shown here. The porch lay at ground level, while the rest of the house was elevated for protection. All Kachin families could pray to their household
nats,
or ancestral spirits; only chiefs, because of their noble ancestry, could pray directly to the supreme nat Madai. The chief maintained a room for distinguished guests, whose sitting places reflected their relative ranks.

Along with monuments to his greatness and lavish hospitality, a major Kachin chief might live in a house called a
htingnu
(
Figure 25
). Built of bamboo and thatch, the htingnu could be up to 100 feet long, large enough to accommodate the chief’s multiple wives and children, loyal followers from lower-ranked lineages, servants, and slaves. A special hearth was set aside for entertaining guests, whose seating positions were ranked according to their social standing. We call attention to how similar this sounds to the sleeping positions within the plank houses of the Nootka.

Cycling between Egalitarian and Rank Society

The contrast between gumlao and gumsa leaders was great. Under gumlao, each village was autonomous. Some gumsa chiefs, on the other hand, oversaw more than 60 villages at a time. They could ill afford to forget, however, that it was the chief’s entire lineage that enjoyed high rank, not the chief alone. This led to a complex dynamic among brothers.

Some anthropologists suspect that ultimogeniture was a social adaptation to long-fallow agriculture. Slash-and-burn agriculture requires so much land clearance that older sons were encouraged to emigrate to new patches of forest, leaving the youngest son behind to support his elderly parents.

The older brother who decided to emigrate took a group of followers with him to carve out a clearing elsewhere. He then purchased from his younger brother the right to make sacrifices to the ancestral nats of the chiefly lineage, becoming the “thigh-eating chief” of his own junior lineage. An older brother who declined to emigrate had only two choices: he could become a ritual specialist, or he could remain subservient to his younger brother.

An older brother who remained subservient could become so disgruntled as to become a political rival. In 1940, according to Leach, five villages in the Hpalang district recognized one man as their chief, while four other villages recognized a rival. No marriages were allowed across this factional divide, and Leach suspected that the ultimate outcome would be the collapse of hereditary rank and a return to achievement-based society.

Armed with these data, let us now consider the logical premises of gumlao and gumsa society. Our goal will be to determine the ways in which an egalitarian, achievement-based society had to change in order to produce a society with ranked lineages.

The premises of gumlao society, according to Leach, were as follows:

  1. All lineages are considered equal.

  2. All villages in a territory are politically autonomous.

  3. Each village has a headman, to whom no tribute is owed.

  4. Debts require modest repayment, with what we would call interest. (We discuss this in detail later.)

  5. The price for all brides is the same.

  6. Men of lineage A marry women of lineage B. Men of lineage B marry women of lineage C. Men of lineage C marry women of lineage A.

  7. All siblings are equal. It makes no difference whether one is born first or last.

  8. When a lineage grows and divides, there is no senior or junior division; both are equal.

  9. One’s loyalty is to the place where one lives.

10. Each headman is to be advised by a council of elders.

11. Land is controlled by all the lineages that originally entered the region. Late arrivals must negotiate for land.

12. Everyone makes sacrifices to his or her household ancestors, to one of the lesser sky spirits, and to one of the lesser earth spirits.

13. The head of each lineage does the above and also makes sacrifices to a regional spirit, to a sky spirit other than the supreme spirit Madai, and to an earth spirit other than the supreme spirit Shadip.