Marvin Harris (Our Kind): The Birth of the Great Providers and From Bigman to Chiefs

Nothing is more symptomatic of the difference between reciprocity and redistribution than the acceptance of boastfulness as an attribute of leadership. In flagrant violation of prescriptions for modesty in reciprocal exchanges, redistributive exchange involves public proclamations that the redistributor is a generous person and a great provider. Boasting was carried to extremes by the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island during the competitive feasts called potlatches. Seemingly obsessed with their own importance, Kwakintl redistributor chiefs said things like this:

Redistribution is not an arbitrary economic style that people pick and choose according to whim, since the career of a redistributor is predicated on his ability to increase production. Selection for redistribution occurs only when conditions are such that the extra effort really does pay off. But getting people to work harder can affect production negatively. In simple foraging societies like the !Kung, individuals who try to intensify the capture of animals and collection of wild plants increase the risk of overkill and the depletion of plant resources. To encourage a !Kung hunter to act like a mumi is to place him and his followers in imminent danger of starvation. In contrast, depletions are less of an immediate menace for agriculturalists such as the Siuai and the Kaoka. Crops can often be planted over a wider area, cultivated and weeded more meticulously, and helped along with extra water and fertilizer without imminent danger of depletions.

But I need to avoid placing too much emphasis on the formal distinction between foraging and agricultural modes of production. The Kwakintl were not agriculturalists, yet their mode of production was highly intensifiable. They got most of their food from prodigious annual upriver runs of salmon and candlefish, and as long as they used only aboriginal dip nets, they could not readily deplete these species. In their aboriginal form, potlatches therefore were an effective means of stimulating production. Like the Kwakintl, many societies that lacked agriculture nonetheless lived in permanent communities that had marked inequalities in rank. Some, like the Kwakiutl, even possessed lowly commoners whose status resembled that of slaves. The majority of these nonegalitarian foraging societies seem to have developed along seacoasts and rivers, where localized beds of shellfish, concentrated fish runs, or sea mammal colonies encouraged the building of permanent settlements and where extra labor could be used to increase the productivity of the habitat.

Yet in general, it is among agricultural societies that the greatest leeway for intensification existed. And in general, the more intensifiable the agricultural base of a redistributive system, the greater its potential for giving rise to sharp divisions of rank, wealth, and power. But before I tell the story of how those whom the mumi served became the servants of the mumi, let me pause to consider another issue. Granted that mumihood was good for production, why was it good for the mumi? Why would people go to such lengths to be able to boast about how much they gave away?

The slide (or ascent?) toward social stratification gained momentum wherever extra food produced by the inspired diligence of redistributors could be stored while awaiting muminas feasts, potlatches, and other occasions of redistribution. The more concentrated and abundant the honest and the less perishable the crop, the greater its potential for endowing big men with power over people. While others would possess some stored-up foods of their own, the redistributors' stores would be the largest. In times of scarcity, people would come to him, expecting to be fed, and, in return, he would call upon those who had special skills to make cloth, pots, canoes, or a fine house for his own use. Eventually, the redistributor no longer needed to work in the fields to gain and surpass big-man status. Management of the harvest surpluses, a portion of which continued to be given to him for use in communal feasts and other communal projects such as trading expeditions and warfare, was sufficient to validate his status. And increasingly, people viewed this status as an office, a sacred trust, passed on from one generation to the next according to rules of hereditary succession. The big man had become a chief; his dominion was no longer a single small, autonomous village, but a large political community, a chiefdom.

Returning to the South Pactfic and the Trobriand Islands, one can catch a glimpse of how these pieces of encroaching stratification fell into place. The Trobrianders had hereditary chiefs who held sway over more than a dozen villages containing several thousand people. Only chiefs could wear certain shell ornaments as the insignia of high rank, and it was forbidden for commoners to stand or sit in a position that put a chief's head at a lower elevation. Malinowski tells of seeing all the people present in the village of Bwoytalu drop from their verandas "as if blown down by a hurricane" at the sound of a drawn-out cry warning that an important chief was approaching.

Yams were the Trobrianders' staff of life; the chiefs validated their status by storing and redistributing copious quantities of them acquired through donations from their brothers-in-law at harvest time. Similar "gifts" were received by husbands who were commoners, but chiefs were polygynous, and having as many as a dozen wives, they received many more yams than anyone else. Chiefs placed their yam supply on display on racks specifically built for this purpose next to their houses. Commoners did the same, but a chiefs ram racks towered over all others. They used their yams when entertaining guests, to hold lavish feasts, and to feed canoe-building specialists, artisans, magicians, and family servants. In former times, the yam stores also furnished the base for launching long-distance trading expeditions among friendly groups and raids against enemies.

This pattern of giving food as a gift to hereditary chiefs who store, display, and redistribute it was not an isolated oddity of the South Seas. The pattern recurs over and over again, with minor variations, on several continents. Striking parallels were seen, for example, 12,000 miles away from the Trobrianders, among chiefdoms that flourished throughout the southeastern region of the United States. I am thinking especially of the Cherokee, former inhabitants of Tennessee as described by the eighteenth-century naturalist William Bartram.

At the center of the principal Cherokee settlements stood a large circular house where a council of chiefs discussed issues involving their villages and where redistributive feasts were held. The council of chiefs had a paramount who was the principal figure in the Cherokee redistributive network. At harvest time a large crib, identified as the "chief's granary," was erected in each field. "To this each family carries and deposits a certain quantity according to his [sic} ability or inclination, or none at all if he so chooses." The chief's granaries functioned as "a public treasury . . . to fly to for succor" in the case of crop failure, as a source of food "to accommodate strangers, or travellers," and as a military store "when they go forth on hostile expeditions." Although every citizen enjoyed "the right of free and public access," commoners had to acknowledge that the store really belonged to the supreme chief who had "an exclusive right and ability . . . to distribute comfort and blessings to the necessitous. "

Supported by voluntary prestations, chiefs and their families could now enjoy life-styles that set them increasingly apart from their followers. They could build bigger and finer. houses for themselves, eat and dress more sumptuously, and enjoy the sexual favors and personal services of several wives. Despite these harbingers, people in chiefdoms voluntarily invested unprecedented amounts of labor on behalf of communal projects. They dug moats, threw up defensive earthen embankments, and erected great log palisades around their villages. They heaped up small mountains of rubble and soil to form platforms and mounds on top of which they built temples and big houses for their chief. Working in teams and using nothing but levers and rollers, they moved rocks weighing fifty tons or more and set them in precise lines and perfect circles forming sacred precincts for communal rituals marking the change of seasons. Donated labor created the megalithic alignments of Stonehenge and Carnac, put up the great statues on Easter Island, shaped the huge stone heads of the Olmec in Vera Cruz, dotted Polynesia with ritual precincts set on great stone platforms, and filled the Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi valleys with hundreds of mounds, the largest of which, at Cahokia near East St. Louis, covered fourteen acres and was 100 feet high. Not until it was too late did people realize that their boastful chiefs were about to keep the meat and ht for themselves while giving nothing but bones and stale cakes to their followers.