The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (5 page)

One of the most important behaviors we look at in this chapter is the creation of widespread networks of cooperating neighbors. We also examine the archaeological record for comparable networks in the distant past.

SURVIVING THE ICE

Archaeologists have often compared the Gravettians and Magdalenians of Ice Age Europe to the recent Eskimo (or Inuit, as they call themselves). The Ice Age preservation of meat by freezing, the shelters built of animal bone, the knives resembling the Eskimo woman’s
ulu,
the animal-oil lamps, the ivory carvings, and the heavy dependence on reindeer all invite comparisons to living Arctic peoples. To be sure, the Ice Age in Europe ended 10,000 years ago. But as recently as 1920 there were still indigenous foragers at the top of the world, largely unaffected by the industrialized West, who earned their living under conditions reminiscent of the Ice Age.

The Eskimo were not the first people to enter Arctic America. The archaeological record shows that some of the earliest occupants of that region were boreal forest hunters whose behavior resembled that of the later Athapaskan people of Canada. Some 4,000 years ago, however, an archaeological complex called the “Arctic Small Tool Tradition” foreshadowed later Eskimo culture. The people using these small tools kept warm in semi-subterranean houses with tunnel entrances, essentially a sod-covered version of the later igloo.

About 2,500 years ago, from the Mackenzie River on the west to Hudson Bay on the east, a new and more convincingly proto-Eskimo culture spread over the Canadian Arctic. Called the “Dorset Culture,” it was created by hunters who lit oil-burning lamps on Arctic nights, used snow-cutting knives to build igloos, made bone shoes for sled runners, used antler or walrus-ivory spikes to walk on ice, and left behind models of what were probably kayaks.

Thousands of years would pass, however, before the full richness of Eskimo culture was revealed to the West. The great pioneer of Eskimo anthropology was the intrepid Knud Rasmussen. Raised in a Danish settlement in Greenland, Rasmussen learned to converse with the local Eskimo as a child. By the 1920s he was using his language skills to study the Eskimo of the Canadian Arctic. Every Eskimo expert of the last 80 years owes him an intellectual debt.

The Eskimo of the 1920s, of course, knew nothing of the Dorset Culture. Like every society of which we know, they had their own cosmological explanation of how their world had come into being. And that cosmology provided the moral justification for their social logic.

The Netsilik Eskimo of the central Canadian Arctic, for example, believed that Earth had always existed. During mythological time, however, humans lived in perpetual darkness like that of the Arctic winter—no sunlight, no animals, and no pleasure or suffering existed. Then Nuliajuk, an orphan girl pushed from a kayak, sank to the ocean bottom and became Mistress of the Sea. She then created all animals, all hard work, and all pleasure.

During this primordial era, both humans and animals could speak, and there was little difference between them. Finally the Arctic hare cried out for “day,” and there was light; but day was forced to alternate with night, because the nocturnal Arctic fox cried out for “darkness.”

At first there were no Netsilik, only the Tunrit, or “Old Ones,” superhuman beings who rendered the land inhabitable. The Tunrit left when the Netsilik arrived, but not before they had invented the leister for spearing fish, the long stone walls for driving caribou on foot, the weir for fishing, and the craft of hunting caribou from kayaks.

In the cosmology of the Netsilik, a gradual process of differentiation created deities, humans, and animals out of primordial chaos. Pleasure and suffering were established to give life meaning. With the crystallization of the visible world came the establishment of moral order, a series of prohibitions to control wickedness and promote restraint.

Because humans and animals had breath, they could interact with the Spirit of the Air, giving them more power than plants or rocks. The difference between humans and animals was that humans had names; one’s name was so magical that it made one superior to a caribou or seal. The Spirit of the Air, whose actions could be felt in wind and weather, was one of three spirits more mysterious and powerful than any others. The second of these was the Mistress of the Sea, already mentioned, who controlled the souls of all sea creatures. The third was the Spirit of the Moon, who controlled the souls of all animals on land.

Like many foraging societies, the Eskimo believed that humans would be reincarnated. They were stoic in the face of death because they saw it as a recycling of the soul from one body to another. An occasional elderly Eskimo, tired of the struggle against hunger and cold, took his or her own life, confident of returning as a newborn. So strong was this belief that babies might be given the name of a deceased elder, or even referred to as “grandmother” or “grandfather.”

Eskimos loved children, but in a land where starvation was endemic, their belief in reincarnation made infanticide a pragmatic decision in times of stress. When a family knew that it could not afford another mouth to feed, it might simply leave a newborn outside to freeze—in effect, saying to its spirit, “Please come back later; this is not a good time.” This act was performed before the infant had been named, so that the recycled spirit within it would not be insulted; indeed, without the magic of a name, the tiny creature was not yet human. If another family heard the infant’s cries and felt that they had the means to feed it, it was theirs to adopt.

Most Eskimo groups of central and eastern Canada lived in societies without clans, dividing their year between hunting caribou, harpooning seal, and catching fish. While men killed the seal and caribou, the onerous task of processing the carcasses into meat, hides, bones, and useful organs fell to the women. Marriage was first and foremost an economic partnership, maintained in spite of low population densities and incest prohibitions that sometimes made it hard to find a spouse.

Among the Caribou Eskimo of Hudson Bay, years of female infanticide might leave marriageable women in short supply. Some families therefore betrothed their children in infancy, hoping to ensure that each hunter would one day have a wife. Eskimo marriage had to be a flexible relationship, adaptable to a variety of economic situations. Its four major forms, according to Tiger Burch, were as follows. In one type of marriage, familiar to Westerners, a man and a woman became attracted to each other and married. A second type of marriage, however, involved one man and two wives. Such polygamous unions were favored in cases where a gifted hunter was killing enough game to support two wives and needed both just to process the carcasses. His second wife was added only after the first relationship was stable, and the older wife usually remained the dominant one.

In regions where years of female infanticide made eligible brides scarce, there was a third type of marriage: one wife with two husbands. Processing animals for two hunters was a great burden for the woman, but no man was expected to process them for himself. The two husbands served as co-fathers to the children.

Finally, some Eskimos practiced a kind of co-marriage in which two couples shared sexual partners. This usually happened when two men hunted together and became close friends. Sometimes the wives were coerced into co-marriage, and sometimes they joined willingly. One advantage of co-marriage was that it made siblings out of all the children born to both couples, setting up long-term obligations of food sharing, protection, and mutual support.

THE CARIBOU ESKIMO AND THE EGALITARIAN ETHIC

When anthropologist Kaj Birket-Smith visited the Caribou Eskimo during the period 1921–1924, some 437 of them occupied 60,000 square miles to the west of Hudson Bay. Their land was an Arctic heath of lichens and low bushes, and their staple foods consisted of caribou, seal, walrus, Arctic hare, ptarmigan, salmon, trout and pike—not unlike the diet of the Ice Age Magdalenians.

Men built igloos in winter, hunted, fished, and drove sled dogs; women built tents in summer, tended fires, and tailored clothing from skins. As with so many foragers, no one amassed a surplus. No one claimed exclusive rights to the land. Traps and weirs were communal property. During famines, all food was shared with neighbors. After a successful hunt, the actual slayer of each caribou was identified by the markings on his arrow. The meat was then divided by rule, with the slayer receiving the frontal portion and his hunting companions the rest.

So crucial was food sharing that the Eskimo used ridicule to prevent hoarding and greed. Anyone who has seen Eskimos singing satirical songs about greedy individuals or dancing in masks to ridicule stingy neighbors realizes the crucial role that humor plays in human society. Troublemakers were given the silent treatment and might even be left behind when a camp moved. It was expected that a truly dangerous, aggressive individual would be killed by his own family. If, however, a neighbor did it, he might have to flee to avoid the family’s revenge.

Life in the Arctic was stressful, but the behaviors just described are not unusual for a clanless society. It was a truly egalitarian society in which the slightest attempt to hoard or put oneself above others was discouraged. A skilled hunter and good provider might be universally respected, but even he was expected to be generous and unassuming.

The Eskimo lived in a world where magic existed alongside practical knowledge and the spirits of humans and animals never really died. Some rock outcrops were considered places where people or animals had been turned to stone, and because they now lacked breath, they could no longer interact with the Spirit of the Air.

THE NETSILIK ESKIMO AND THE CREATION OF LARGER NETWORKS

The caribou that winter near the tree line in Manitoba migrate north to the Arctic coast in spring. By September they are headed south again. In days of old they had to pass through the land of the Netsilik Eskimo, who used long fences of boulders to divert the caribou toward bowmen.

Anthropologist Asen Balikci describes Netsilik territory as a tundra with lakes and rivers and, near the Arctic coast, saltwater bays. Ringed seals were common in these bays and were easier to hunt in winter, after the caribou had moved south. During that season, with the bays frozen over, seals could be killed at their breathing holes by men waiting with harpoons. The Netsilik also fished for the migratory salmon-trout, or Arctic char, with spears and leisters; they captured seabirds by hurling bolas of stones and thongs.

Like many other Eskimo groups of central and eastern Canada, the Netsilik lived in a society without clans. Female infanticide was frequent but could be forestalled when women were in short supply. At such times the parents of infant girls might be asked to betroth them early. This is a good example of a contradiction in social logic, which can be expressed in the following principles:

  1. Male infants are valued because they will become hunters.

  2. Female infants are expendable because the Arctic has few plants for women to gather.

  3. Hunters need wives to process their caribou and seals.

  4. At the moment, there are not enough girls to provide wives for all the young men in the region.

  5. Premise 4 trumps premise 2, so female infants are no longer expendable and might even be worth bride service.

SEAL-SHARING PARTNERSHIPS

We come now to a very important Netsilik social strategy called
niqaiturasuaktut.
That awesome word is the name of a Netsilik meat-sharing partnership, first described in 1956 by a priest from the Pelly Bay Mission, and it has implications far beyond the Netsilik.

Early in the life of a Netsilik boy, his mother chose for him a group of male partners, ideally 12. Close relatives and members of the group who camped with the boy’s family were not eligible; his mother’s goal was to choose individuals who, under ordinary circumstances, would have no close relationship with her son.

Eventually the time came when the boy in question had become a hunter. Waiting silently by a breathing hole in the ice, he saw his chance and harpooned a seal. Ritual demanded that the animal be placed on a layer of fresh snow before being carefully skinned (
Figure 1
). Though dead, it was given water so that its soul, when reincarnated, would be grateful and allow the seal to be killed again.

Next, the harpooner’s wife cut the seal open lengthwise and divided the meat and blubber into 14 predetermined parts. Twelve of these parts would go to the partners chosen for him. The last two parts, the least desirable, would go to the harpooner himself. The first partner—addressed by the term
okpatiga,
“my hindquarters”—would receive the
okpat
or hindquarters of the seal. The second partner—addressed by the term
taunungaituga,
“my high part”—would receive the
taunungaitok
or forequarters. Subsequent partners received the lower belly, the side, the neck, the head, the intestines, and so on.

FIGURE 1.
   Netsilik Eskimo families created social networks through the sharing of seal meat. After laying the dead seal on a layer of clean snow and offering it a drink of water, an Eskimo woman would use her
ulu
knife to skin it and cut it into 14 portions. (Only 11 of the portions are shown on the diagrams, as the other three are internal.) Twelve of the 14 portions were then given to meat-sharing partners.