Chiefdoms

1
Chiefdoms

• Examples of Regional Polities

2
Some comments on JEs assessment of regional
polities

• Underestimate the size of acephalous societies
• Overestimate
• need for formal
• organization
• up to societies
• 10,000 people

3
Macroevolution again

• Population pressure cant 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

4
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

5
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

6
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

7
Austronesian phenomenonPatrick Kirch (2000) On
the Road of the Winds
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Language map
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Lapita Phenomenon
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Lapita pottery very diagnostic(oddly,
Polynesians in the E. Lapita realm later abandon
pottery!)
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Lapita expansion very rapid
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Core technology basic tropical horticulture plus
13
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
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Austronesian sailors could point fairly close to
the wind
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Austronesian exploration stategy
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Ranked lineage social organization
Proto-Oceanic term for ancestor tumpu
Polynesian clans patrilineal Trobriand clans
matrilineal
The novel element is formal offices not dependent
upon the entrepreneurship of an ambitious
individual
In the Lapita case, chieftainship in an open
environment a stimulus to pioneering Every
successful pioneer a chief!
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The Functions of Chiefs

• Domestic tranquilitysuppression 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 (?)

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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

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The Trobriand Islands Case
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Pioneering ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski
studied Trobrianders 1914-1917
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Subsistence tropical horticulture fishing
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Gardening highly ritualized
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Rather intricate gender division of labor in
gardening
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Mature garden
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Fishing major protein source
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Stratified social organization
Chief Touluwa
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Chief and his storehouse
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Ceremonial display of harvest
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Modern yam shelter
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Kula Trade system
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Kula Ring trade
Kula Ring trade
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Armband
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Necklaces
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Ceremonial trade
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Substantial canoes carry mundane cargoclay
pots, fine stone
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Kula market
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Evolution of Chiefdoms in Polynesia Rather Diverse
Open systems small, highly competitive chiefdoms
Near-state systems Tonga-Samoa Division of
religious and secular authority Hawaii
Class-based distinctions
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Marquesian Open Sytem
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Easter Island Collapse of open system
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Hawaii

• 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

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Chiefly display feather cloaks
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Economic intensification under chiefly supervision
Reef-flat fishponds
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Pond-field irrigation systems
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Population equilibrium?
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Basseri
Notable features Pastoral tribe Component
of state Tribal chief part of state elite
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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