The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (41 page)

Despite the division of Apa Tani society into aristocrats and former slaves, relations between the two groups were surprisingly accommodating. In fact, many mura clans shared a ceremonial building with an aristocratic clan, on whom they depended for proper instruction in ritual protocol.

In the village of Haja the aristocratic Nada clan shared its sitting platform with two mura clans, the Dusu and Dora. Fürer-Haimendorf often observed aristocrats and former slaves eating together, with minimal regard for rank. Nevertheless, the mura could neither expect to rise to mite levels nor intermarry with mite.

It is possible that, given time, some clans of former slaves might have taken on the status of a caste. For example, as in the case of many Indian castes, certain craft specialties were associated only with mura. Pottery making was monopolized by four former slave clans of the village of Michi-Bamin. Ironworking had become so associated with the mura that even aristocrats who engaged in it found their social status lowered.

Most extreme was the case of the mura women who castrated pigs for each village. This occupational specialty was considered so abhorrent that its practitioners were banned from participation in feasts and religious rituals and could not even enter the house of another family. The way these women were shunned reminds us of the untouchable caste of India, to whom the most unpleasant tasks were relegated. The difference, Fürer-Haimendorf tells us, is that in the cosmology of the Apa Tani, concepts of purity and ritual pollution did not play the powerful role that they did in Indian society.

At the upper levels of Apa Tani society there were subtle differences, like those among the four chiefs of the Tikopia. In theory, all mite clans were equal; in practice, however, some were “first among equals.” The differences were attributed to senior versus junior descent. In Hang, a village of 514 households, two mite clans were considered senior to all others. These were the Tenio and Tablin clans, which made up roughly 2 percent of the village. They were considered senior to all other clans as a result of their descent from Ato Tiling, the legendary forefather of all Hang families.

THE APA TANI VERSUS THE DAFLA AND MIRI

Over the centuries the relations between the Apa Tani, Dafla, and Miri oscillated between (1) intense exchanges of goods, requiring peaceful reciprocal visits, and (2) hostile interactions such as raids, kidnappings, and individual homicides. Having no strong central authority, an Apa Tani village often found one of its residential wards trading with the Dafla while another was feuding with them. The sources of friction were many. The Apa Tani, as we explain later, were intensive rice cultivators. To obtain animals for food or sacrifice, they often traded surplus rice to the Dafla. They were also able to use unpaid loans of rice to turn Dafla families into debt slaves. Debts could lead to the confiscation of cattle or the taking of captives for ransom.

Fürer-Haimendorf was told of past raids in which more than ten men were killed and an equal number of women and children captured. Trophies claimed included the enemies’ hands, eyes, or tongues, which were ceremonially buried upon the raiding party’s return. Raids took the form of sneak attacks at dawn. They were preceded by rituals in which dogs and chickens were sacrificed to ensure success and followed by the negotiation of peace treaties.

Almost certainly there had been a time, long long ago, when the Apa Tani, the Dafla, and the Miri engaged in endless cycles of tribal warfare. At some point along the way, however, the strategy of the Apa Tani began to change. By the time of Fürer-Haimendorf’s first visit, they had begun to substitute profit for revenge. After successfully resisting a Dafla attack, they did not kill their prisoners. Instead, they immobilized each Dafla captive by locking one of his ankles inside a hole in an impossibly heavy log (
Figure 34
). The Apa Tani fed and entertained the prisoner until his family paid his ransom. The ransom was then invested in more rice paddies.

Among the Apa Tani, achieving one’s goals by peaceful means rather than violence became a path to prominence. To be sure, the Apa Tani would fight if there were no other option, but they had come to prefer wealth over war.

The Secrets of Apa Tani Success

The cosmos of the Apa Tani was similar to that of other Tibeto-Burman hill tribes. Their world had been created by a celestial couple, Chandun and Didun. Chandun, the husband, made Earth; his wife, Didun, made Sky. Human beings, including the Apa Tani, had been created by a second spirit couple. Lesser spirits were to be found living in rock outcrops and other natural features. Rank survived after death, with aristocrats and former slaves continuing to live in the afterlife as they had on earth.

Chandun had created the Kele Valley as a series of swamps and bogs, crisscrossed by the river and its tributaries. The Apa Tani had turned it into a completely manicured landscape. Twenty square miles of the valley floor were transformed with dams and terraces into a semitropical paradise of wet rice paddies. The Apa Tani stabilized the high ground by planting bamboo, pines, and fruit trees. Still farther upslope lay an untended rain forest of orchids, tree ferns, and rhododendrons. It was, by the 1940s, one of the most carefully managed landscapes on earth.

The Dafla and Miri, limited to dry rice grown on hillsides, suffered chronic shortfalls. Like the other tribal societies so far described, they lacked any concept of private ownership of land. Earth was a living being. One could grow things on its surface but not own pieces of it. A clan could assign its members the right to use certain areas, but when they moved on those areas were reassigned. To own individual bits of Earth was as unthinkable as owning individual bits of Sky. A farmer could privatize the basket of rice he had harvested because it was the fruit of his labor. He could not privatize the land on which it grew.

FIGURE 34.
   The Apa Tani of Assam were traditionally divided into aristocrats and slaves. On the left we see a young woman wearing the ornaments characteristic of an aristocratic lineage. On the right we see a Dafla prisoner with his foot immobilized by a heavy log. If his relatives did not ransom him, the Apa Tani would convert him into a slave.

The Apa Tani differed from their neighbors in having three types of land: clan land, village land, and private land. Virtually all the wet rice terraces they created were private, and as such they became a source of private wealth. In the social logic of the Apa Tani, the fact that a family had invested labor in converting a bog to a rice paddy made it their private creation. Apa Tani families also owned granaries, bamboo groves, and garden plots of different kinds. Clan land, on the other hand, was set aside for public buildings, cemeteries, pastures for animals, and forest resources. The latter included pine trees, used for house construction, which were carefully managed.

Wet rice cultivation is labor-intensive. The Apa Tani had six different kinds of rice, which were grown in nurseries, transplanted to irrigated terraces, and fertilized with human and animal manure. Agricultural labor was provided by work gangs called
patangs,
to which every Apa Tani belonged from childhood. Husbands, wives, children, relatives, and former slaves worked together to build dams, canals, and terraces, to transplant, and to garden. It was the responsibility of the paddy’s owner to feed the patang, and wealthy families could hire extra labor gangs to farm their large holdings. Such pay allowed the members of a patang to buy more land of their own.

Once having accepted the privatization of land, the Apa Tani began to invest in little else. They discovered that a family with five or six members could produce its yearly supply of rice (about 300 basketloads) on one and a half to two acres. To plant more was to create surplus, and surplus meant even greater wealth. Many Apa Tani families did not have to devote a single acre to grazing land because they could get all the animals they needed from the Dafla in exchange for rice.

The Apa Tani sacrificed cattle, pigs, and dogs, paid for brides with mithan cattle, and hosted feasts of merit with animals purchased from rice-poor neighbors. Even after cotton was introduced to the region, most Apa Tani weavers did not make room for it among their rice paddies. They let the Dafla grow cotton, purchased it with surplus rice, and even returned the cotton seeds to the Dafla after the bolls had been ginned.

While the mura were clans made up of former slaves, new slaves were periodically created by raids and unpaid debts. These slaves, like surplus rice, became a source of wealth. An aristocrat who had invested all his surplus in new paddies could obtain additional mithan for a feast by selling a slave. Even a mura clan, if desperate, might sell one of its members into slavery for cattle.

It was a slave’s exchange value that turned the Apa Tani from vengeance to ransom. Any prominent prisoner taken in a raid would be ransomed by his or her family, and captives too lowly to ransom would be sold as slaves. The profit was used to buy more rice land. The Apa Tani did not have bumper stickers, but if they had, the most popular would have read: “Make wealth, not war.”

The Logic of Apa Tani Society

Once upon a time the Apa Tani almost certainly shared much of the social logic of the Dafla and Miri. The latter belonged to clans whose members had the right to farm, but not actually own, a portion of the earth’s surface. They could privatize their harvests because those were the products of their own labor—the slashing and burning of the wild vegetation and the planting, weeding, and reaping of their crop. They could not, however, privatize Earth. It lay fallow while they cleared another patch of forest, and once its fertility was restored, it could be assigned to another family from the same clan.

To convert an unproductive swamp to productive rice paddies, however, impressive labor is needed. There are check-dams to be built, canals to be dug, terraces to be contoured, and water to be trapped by raising field borders. Having invested this much work in the creation of a paddy, no Apa Tani family was willing to cede its use to another family. They considered it just as much their property as the crop itself, and they therefore maintained its fertility with manure to prevent its going fallow and being reassigned. Over time, while Earth remained the creation of Chandun, the wet-rice paddy came to be seen as a creation of human labor.

Privatization created incentives for intensive agriculture, wealth creation, and a focus on rice production that took land away from other activities. It made many Apa Tani families the equivalent of the Cauca Valley’s “nobles by wealth.” Privatization, however, undermined long-standing principles of corporate ownership. It relegated clan land to areas of low productivity and converted some slaves from agricultural laborers to a form of capital that could be sold to buy land.

In previous chapters we saw that war was virtually endemic among rank societies. To paraphrase Sean Connery’s character in
The Untouchables,
their philosophy was, “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue.”

The Apa Tani, however, show us that endless blood feuds are not inevitable. Instead of applying the principle of social substitution and taking revenge on their prisoners, the Apa Tani turned them into profit. This behavior created a logical contradiction: the desire for wealth now trumped clan loyalty and the principle of social substitution. This contradiction explains the unwillingness of one ward to be drawn into a neighboring ward’s feud, especially if it might reduce profits.

The Nature of Apa Tani Inequality

Kachin society had thigh-eating chiefs. Konyak Naga society had great Angs. The Apa Tani had hereditary rank and wealth, but no chiefs at all. They present us with an alternative form of rank society, one that may well have existed in prehistory but would be very hard to detect archaeologically.

The Apa Tani had a hereditary aristocracy that provided all community leaders. That leadership, however, was exercised by a council rather than by a powerful individual. As we saw earlier, the ancient Greeks referred to such a system as oligarchy, or rule by a privileged few.

We have described Apa Tani society as based on rank, but one could argue that it was almost stratified. We raise this possibility because the mite and mura were not allowed to intermarry. Such an impermeable barrier between the elite and nonelite was, as we shall see in later chapters, characteristic of societies that had developed true strata or hereditary classes. The fact that some mite clans included mura families, however, convinces us that the Apa Tani were not fully stratified.

Most achievement-based societies, as we have seen, opposed the accumulation of wealth by individual families and pressured them to distribute it to others. The Apa Tani did not do so, although they did retain the feast of merit which, in other societies, was used to redistribute wealth. Unlike those other societies, the Apa Tani admired wealth and increasingly sought rich men for the village council. They did preserve the concept of clan land but devoted it increasingly to ritual buildings and sitting platforms, while wealthy families bought up the best rice fields. Clan solidarity suffered as wealthy families pursued profit.