Chiefdoms

Examples of “Regional Polities”

Some comments on J&E’s assessment of regional polities

• Underestimate the size of acephalous societies

• Overestimate

need for formal

organization

up to societies

~ 10,000 people

• Population pressure can’t be rate limiting step• What is?

– Technology?

– Social organization?

• Many people suspect social organization– Douglas North, Bob Bettinger

– The work-arounds hypothesis• Hard to adapt people to live in big complex societies

• Social organization not observable” and not trialable

Macroevolution again

Some other important issues• Functional versus conflict theories of social complexification:

untangling a major social science paradox

– Leaders do have prosocial functions

– Formal offices invariably (?) lead to social stratification

– Polities do expand by violent conquest

• Why not democracy?

– Simpler societies egalitarian

– Big Man system proto-democratic

– Yet main path to complexity is via ranked lineages and hereditary elite classes

• Group selection favors social system with best work-arounds

– By conquest and by imitation

– Slow process

• More about this in Part II

Historical examples of social-organizational breakthrus

• Shoshone minimalism• Chinese Confucian merit bureaucracy

– Develops after ~ 600 BC– In West after ~ 1700 AD

• Settling of California– Anglos pioneered as family units, but with cooperation

via democratic institutions– Hispanics pioneered as larger extended family groups– Anglo frontier moved faster because of greater social

flexibility

Marshall Sahlins (1963) Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man,

Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia

• Pacific islands as natural experiment

• Melanesia versus Polynesia – Similar distribution of large and small islands

– Melanesians have Big Man systems even on very big islands

– Polynesians have chiefs even on small islands

• Human social organization is conservative on millennial time scales: historical versus ecological causation?

• Trobriand Islanders an exception? Melanesians with a chiefdom?

• Big advances in Oceanian anthropology since 1963– Melanesia turns out to be culturally and biologically

heterogeneous

Austronesian phenomenon:Patrick Kirch (2000) On the Road of the Winds

Language map

Lapita Phenomenon

Lapita pottery very diagnostic

(oddly, Polynesians in the E. Lapita realm later abandon pottery!)

Lapita expansion very rapid

Core technology: basic tropical horticulture plus

Sailing leeward vs windward. Safeto beat to windward. If you get into trouble you can sail a jury rigged canoe downwind home.

Lapita navigation strategy

Austronesian sailors could

point fairly close to the wind

Austronesian exploration stategy

Ranked lineage social organization

Polynesian clans patrilinealTrobriand clans matrilinealThe novel element is formaloffices not dependent uponthe entrepreneurship of an ambitious individual

Proto-Oceanic term for ancestor:*tumpu

In the Lapita case,chieftainship in anopen environmenta stimulus to pioneering:Every successful pioneer a chief!

The Functions of Chiefs

• “Domestic tranquility”—suppression of small-scale warfare so prevalent in local-group societies

• Provision of food security– Store surpluses on large scale for redistribution

– Investment in large scale production

• Supervision of intertribal trade– Investment in high tech canoes

• Provision of supernatural services (?)

Dysfunctions of Chiefdoms

• Hereditary principle unreliable supplier of talent (but limits destructive competition for office??)

• Stratification breeds intra-societal tensions

• Violent conflict between chiefs often destructive

• Ideological exploitation of human credulity

The Trobriand Islands Case

Pioneering ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski studied Trobrianders 1914-

1917

Subsistence: tropical horticulture & fishing

Gardening highly ritualized

Rather intricate gender division of labor in gardening

Mature garden

Fishing major protein source

Stratified social organization

Chief Touluwa

Chief and his storehouse

Ceremonial display of harvest

Modern yam shelter

Kula Trade system

Kula Ring trade

Kula Ringtrade

Armband

Necklaces

Ceremonial trade

Substantial canoes carry mundane cargo:clay pots, fine stone

Kula “market”

Evolution of Chiefdoms in Polynesia Rather Diverse

Open systems: small, highly competitive chiefdoms

Near-state systems

Tonga-Samoa: Division of religious and secular authority

Hawai’i: Class-based distinctions

Marquesian Open Sytem

Easter Island: Collapse of open system

Hawai’i

• Large island system– Large population: 250,000-800,000

– Several competing chiefdoms at contact

– United by Kamehameha with trade guns

• Notable for class system– Chiefs ranked three deep

– Class of junior aristocrat managers

– Commoners divorced from ranked lineage system

Chiefly display: feather cloaks

Economic intensification under chiefly supervision

Reef-flat fishponds

Pond-field irrigation systems

Population equilibrium?

Basseri

Notable features

Pastoral tribe

Component of state

Tribal chief part of state elite

Conclusions

• Tribes have formal leadership and usually inegalitarian, stratified social relations

• Kinship still the dominant social institution• Chiefly economic functions various but important• Inter-chiefdom trade and warfare often highly

organized• Easy to see how big chiefdoms become states