Morris Berman
Wandering God
A Study in Nomadic Spirituality
New York 2000pg 70
Emergence of the State
To conclude this survey of the causes of the rise of social inequality, it would appear that agriculture is far less of a "culprit" than was hitherto imagined.
Distinctions of prestige (ranking) as well as wealth (stratification) took root in certain HG societies well before agriculture ever arrived on the scene. The "breakdown," then, occurred within HG society itself, and over time it became the norm. Once formed, complex institutions have their own agendas.
"Our kind" started with band society, in which the typical size was about twenty-five to thirty people, leadership was context-specific, war (as opposed to aggression or impulsive homicide) was nonexistent; and ritual was largely ad hoc. The archaeological evidence suggests that most of the world's population was organized in this way prior to 10,000 BC.
The second level of development was that of the local group, when storage and some degree of sedentism appeared. Typically, this arrangement has a headman, who often serves to redistribute the surplus, and when headmen begin to vie for this role, you get the Big Man, the charismatic figure.
At this level, the village papulation has risen to anywhere from three hundred to eight hundred persons, it has a clan structure, food sources are domestic, and ceremony has become significant.
Out of this, given enough of a population in-crease, chiefdoms gradually evolve, and this is a new order of magnitude. The size is anywhere from one thousand to one hundred thousand, and ceremonial centers, hierarchy, and stratification—un-equal access to the means of production—are clearly in evidence, along with hereditary leadership.
The evolving pattern, say Johnson and Earle, is fueled by population growth and agricultural expan-sion (which represents opportunity for economic control).
The state now emerges as a function of increasing size. The state is thus like a chiefdom, only more so: bureaucracy, state religion, and police are added on, along with kingship, codified law, taxation, and a military draft.
At some point, the tribesman paying tribute to a chief becomes a peasant paying rent to a lord. Thus, the "progression" is one from a social organization grounded in the nurturance and trust of the family, to one based on prestige and hi-erarchy, and finally, to one run by bureaucracy. The rest, as they say, is (literally) history.
All this is not to say that agriculture was incidental to this pro-cess. In rough outline, Childe's thesis actually remains intact. What agriculture and sedentism did was solidify these trends, render them irreversible. Thus, ranked society usually involves domesticated food sources, while no full-fledged states arose before agriculture became the major source of subsistence (with the possible exception of the Pe-ruvian coast).
Once HGs become storing and sedentary, they can adopt agriculture without any major changes in their way of life. But it is agricultural intensification that enables an incipient class stratification, linked with storage, to evolve into a class society, a civilization.
This is why we see states, writing, and steel-making in agricultural soci-ety, but not before. In the same way, the shift from swiddens (im-permanent fields) to terracing and irrigation is a move toward permanent cultivation and settlement. All of this involves stratification, and stratification and rule by elites are endemic to states.
Both communism (such as it existed until recently) and democracy decorate this truth with an egalitarian ideology, but the reality since we left band society is elite control and differential access to resources.
Civilization has many benefits, and it is also the case that some civilizations are better than others. But what they all have in common, that is, what defines them structurally, is a system of triage.
There are, then, reasons to believe that contemporary HG egalitarianism represents a survival of tendencies that can be traced back to the Paleolithic. Foraging remains a distinct mode of life, what the British anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a "radically alternative mode of relatedness.
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