Morris Berman Wandering God

A Study in Nomadic Spirituality New York 2000 pg 49 POLITICS AND POWER   The human condition is about poverty, injustice, exploitation, war, suffering. To seek the human condition one must go to the bar-rios, shanty towns, and palatial mansions of Rio, Lima, and Mexico City, where massive inequalities of wealth and power have produced fabulous abundance for some and misery for most. When anthropolo-gists look at hunter-gatherers they are seeking something else: a vision of human life and human possibilities without the pomp and glory, but also without the misery and inequity of state and class society. —Richard Lee, "Art, Science, or Politics? The Crisis in Hunter-Gatherer Studies" Let me hear no more of our kind's natural necessity to form hierar-chical groups. An observer viewing human life shortly after cultural takeoff would easily have concluded that our species was destined to be irredeemably egalitarian except for distinctions of sex and age. That someday the world would be divided into aristocrats and commoners, masters and slaves, billionaires and homeless beggars would have seemed wholly contrary to human nature as evidenced in the affairs of every human society then on earth. —Marvin Harris, Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Come From, Where We Are Going   I recall, some years ago, reading a discussion by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow of a course he had taken in graduate school in abnormal psychology. Maslow had forgotten the name of the course textbook, but the images on the dust cover remained engraved in his memory. At the top, said Maslow, was a photograph of newborn in-fants in a nursery, the glow of birth still hovering over them, looking out at the spectator with wide-eyed curiosity. At the bottom was a photograph of commuters on the New York subway system returning home from work, hanging onto the straps, their bodies bent over, a depressed look on their faces. In between the two pictures was a banner headline consisting of two simple but dramatic words: WHAT HAPPENED?  Maslow never says what was actually in the textbook, but my own reaction is that the drama depicted on the dust jacket is one of normal psychology, not abnormal; it shows the fate of humans in civilization, that is, in societies organized around class and power. "Normal," of course, is not the same as "healthy," yet this eventual wearing down of the spirit is fairly common within cultures such as our own. However, what happened is a theme that needs to be applied not merely to individuals, but to large-scale historical shifts.  As the quotes from Lee and Harris above would suggest, anthropologists have not been unwilling to do this. The question of the shift from HG (hunter-gatherer) life to civilization, and of the ori-gins of social inequality, has been a hot topic for some time now. One of the earliest attempts at a solution (in this century, anyway) was that of the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. In The Dawn of European Civilizution (1925), Childe, following Marx, put forth a "global" division based on the introduction of agriculture.  HG societies, he said, are egalitarian; agricultural civilization, complex (i.e., hierarchical). If you want to find the origins of social inequal-ity, on this view, you need look no farther than the nearest seed.  The Childean concept of a "Neolithic Revolution," and the broad dichotomy he posited between foragers and domesticators, set the framework for much of the anthropological thinking of the next four or five decades. (Claude Levi-Strauss' binary classification of the raw and the cooked, for example, is an obvious echo.) For Childe's concept addressed a very real anthropological puzzle:  How is it that after 1 to 2 million years of a very different way of life, character-ized by movement and foraging, agriculture and sedentism were almost universally chosen over this in just a few short millennia?  What Childe did was to integrate the famous argument of the eighteenth- century minister Thomas Malthus, that population was determined by food supply, with the thesis of the nineteenth-century anthropolo-gist, Lewis Henry Morgan, that cultural evolution occurred in stages that were determined by technological change. Hence, said Childe, the development of Western civilization was the result of a series of technological revolutions leading to population growth and social change, amounting to the adoption of agriculture as a way of life. Agriculture was thus a conceptual revolution, for Childe; the introduction of new knowledge, perhaps at an opportune moment in history, which then revolutionized human existence itself.  Childe further argued that it was this change from food procurement to food production that paved the way for civilization, that is, for class society and the state, because only agriculture was capable of guaranteeing a surplus large enough to maintain a "nonproductive" class It was thus in the crucial split between those who domesticated plants and animals, and HGs, who did not, that the rools of civilization could be found. It is important not to underestimate the conceptual power of Childe's argument, even to this day, for he was the first (following Marx) to pose the notion of a global and radical opposition between two types of socioeconomic organization and to locate the origins of civilization in that opposition. We need only contrast the civilization of Sumer in 3500 B.C. to the band societies of, say, 20,000 B.C. (i.e., what we know of them archaeologically) to realize that we are look-ing at two utterly different worlds. Virtually all scholars agree that food production, that is, "the use of domesticated plants and animals as the primary basis of subsistence ... is the economic founda-tion upon which the state and modern civilization are built and maintained." Yet research during the last two decades or so has mounted a serious challenge to the Childe thesis on a number of levels, to the point that some scholars now doubt that a Neolithic Revolution ever took place. At the very least, it is by now abundantly clear that so-cial inequality antedated the deliberate cultivation of the first sheaf of wheat. Let us look, then, at some of this material. Agriculture as a Gradual Development The revision of the Childe thesis revolves around two crucial questions:  (1) Exactly how revolutionary was the Neolithic Revolution?, and  (2) Were Paleolithic HGs truly egalitarian? As we shall see, there is a profound connection between these two issues. To take the first question first, it is by now generally accepted that techniques of plant and animal domestication were fully known before 9000 B.C.; that hunters understood the mechanics (or "organics") of planting well in advance of the rise of agriculture as a new type of economy.  The use of plants existed on a continuum. Hence, the invention or knowledge of agriculture and pastoralism (the man-agement and exploitation of herd animals) is not the issue; what is significant is its acceptance. Motivation, not knowledge of techniques, is the central point here. Archaeological evidence from the Near East and Mesoamerica shows agropastoralism appearing not as an economic revolution but as a long and gradual transition, as part of a "mixed economy".  One of the reasons for this is that agriculture is not a monolithic phenomenon, but something that exists in degrees. Thus, Childe had arguad that agriculture generated a surplus and that it was the phenomenon of surplus that got the machinery of social inequality going. But, as noted, many foraging societies had the technical know-how to generate a surplus and chose not to do so, which is why they have sometimes been called the "original affluent society."  The same is true of a number of agricultural peoples, such as Amazonian Indians prior to the arrival of European settlers. The techno-logical means to generate a surplus were present, but the social mechanisms to do so were not. In addition, archaeological evidence from Peru, as well as from Puebla and Oaxaca in Mexico, shows the existence of what might be called "simple farming," a pattern in which the beginnings of agriculture did not alter the amount of food being produced in any significant way. Instead, agriculture was inconspicuously integrated into the foraging economy and initially proved to be of minor importance, without any corresponding changes in mobility patterns, sedentism, population growth, or social inequality.  Thus, the anthropologist Barbara Göbel argues that agriculture must be established for it to make a difference, not just added on to an economy, and this means the large-scale cultivation of plants rich in calories (e.g., maize). Hence, the existence of agriculture is not synonymous with the existence of an agricultural economy as such. The shift to agriculture must be seen not as a rupture or a concrete event, but as a long, drawn-out, and occasionally nonlinear, process. Studies of settlement patterns, demo-graphic changes, and shifting subsistence patterns make it clear that "Neolithic Revolution" is a phrase that masks millennia of cultural development. Delayed versus Immediate Return Refinement and closer examination of Childe's thesis, and the increasing awareness that neither agriculture nor foraging were monolithic ways of life, in neat opposition to one another, was long in coming; but it was not until the work of the British anthropologist James Woodburn that the weaknesses of that thesis became clear. Woodburn's writings, based on fieldwork he did among the Hadza HGs of Tanzania in the late fifties, brings us to our second question, that of HG egalitarianism. The fundamental split, said Woodburn, was not between foraging and agriculture, or between primitive and civilized, but between peoples caught up in what he called a "delayed-return" economy as opposed to an "immediate-return" one. Some HGs, said Woodburn, actually fell into the former category. We thus have to look for complexity (hierarchy, social inequality) not in the develop-ment of agriculture, but within HG society itself. What Woodburn discovered in Tanzania was that the Hadza do not experience any severe food shortages and that they are unconcerned about the future. The population density is low, and groups move camp often, perhaps every two or three weeks. Although all Hadza consider themselves to be kin, they have few obligations to each other and are not bound by commitments. This is, Woodburn wrote, a major source of their strength. Everyone has direct access to valued assets, and this provides security for all. In Hadza soci-ety, you can separate yourself from those with wham you are in conflict without incurring any loss. Dependency, let alone hierarchy, is not part of the Hadza way of life.  I shall say more about this be-low, but it is important to ponder that what is perhaps the popular image of HG societies—close, warm communities that are simulta-neously very supportive and very conformist/restrictive—may be off the mark. Instead, what we often find is a great deal of autonomy and independence—freedom, in short—although not that of the bour-geois version of individualism of, say, nineteenth-century England. Woodburn also believed that the Hadza were not unique, that "this relative lack of sustained reciprocal load-bearing relationships is widely characteristic of the social organIzation of nomadic hunter-gatherers." Indeed, it usually goes by the name of "fission and fusion" and is a common pattern. What accounts for this freedom? The difference, according to Woodburn, lies in the mode of production. Immediate-return (IR) systems reject the notion of a surplus. Tribes such as the Hadza, the !Kung, and the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire do not accumulate property.    In such societies, even if you don't participate in a particular hunt, you have the right to eat, and individual hunters have no future claims on those they feed. One is not constrained by group decisions, and these societies either have no leaders or have leaders who wield no coercive power.  Delayed-return (DR) societies, which are based on the accumulation of surplus, inevitably lose their egalitarianism; there is a preferred status for those who arrange and manage the surplus for the rest of the tribe. Such systems also create dependency on specific persons so that one is caught up in a network of bind-ing ties and corporate groups that can determine one's survival.  This is typical of agricultural civilization, but, says Woodburn, it is also the rule for DR foragers as well. Thus, sedentary or semisedentary HGs, such as the Haida or Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest; the Plains Indians, who invest time in keeping horses; Australian aborigines, among whom the men retain long-term rights over women (through marriage brokering, etc.) are all DR and characterized by social inequality. Aboriginal society is laced with obligations, conflicts, an elaborate religious life, secret societies of (male) elders, and so on. All of this is more similar to the hierarchy (and the misery) of agricultural civilization than it is to the life of IR hunter-gatherers.   In evolutionary terms, there was undoubtedly some switching back and forth between DR and IR; we know, for example, that there were substantial sedentary communities in existence prior to the Neolithic. But DR systems could not have made a sudden appear- ance on the Paleolithic scene; they had to have evolved from IR societies. Hence, says Woodburn, "There must presumably have been a time when all societies had systems based on immediate return." :   Only HG life, he asserts, permits so great an emphasis on equality, although a number of foraging societies have inequalities which are even greater than those of some agricultural or pastoral societies. Central to the IR economy—or at least, a necessary condition for it—is the phenomenon of movement. Movement works heavily against any tendencies toward surplus building and accumulation, which suggests that sedentism is a key factor in the origins of social inequality. In addition, the nomadic life is one that acts as a natural leveler of social conflict, which becomes a major issue once human beings start to create permanent settlements.    In an article on "Egalitarian Societies," Woodburn examined six foraging societies with IR economies: the Mbuti, the !Kung, the Pandaram and Paliyan of southern India, the Batek Negrito of Malaysia, and the Hadza. In all six, he says, movement is fundamental.  There are no fixed dwell-ings or base camps; people live in small camp units of twelve to twenty-four individuals and move frequently. The groups are flexible, with composition changing constantly, and individuals have a choice of whom they associate with (this is the "fission-and-fusion" pattern referred to above). Conflict, when it does arise, is resolved by simply moving away, and no one's livelihood is jeopardized as a result. Movement thus enables social ties to be manipulated without strain, and the Hadza move at the drop of a hat. No one is in charge, and this is modeled within the family as well. The values taught are ones of personal autonomy and sharing, not dependency and authority.  All of this works against the formation of hierarchy and social inequality, as well as against the possibility of farming.  The sharing ethos means that fields get "raided" before the grain is harvested, and once harvested, there exist great pressures to share, rather than accumulate. Motivation to invest in farming is thus very low, and hence in order to understand how agriculture did develop, we need to look more closely at delayed-return HGs, "who have the values and the organisation to facilitate the transition." Woodburn thus pushed the locus of social inequality back from agricultural civilization to HGs, but the question still remains as to what led IR egalitarian systems to change, to become DR systems with hierarchical arrangements.

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