The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (34 page)

The third of Goldman’s sources of power was
toa.
While toa referred to a durable tree known as “ironwood,” it was also a metaphor for bravery and toughness. Toa was applied to warriors in general, and especially to those who distinguished themselves in battle. A key aspect of toa was that it allowed for a certain degree of social mobility. A warrior of humble birth could rise in prominence to the point where he had to be taken seriously, even by chiefly individuals. For his part, a chief who fought bravely became a legend.

All chiefly Polynesian societies relied on a combination of mana, toa, and tohunga. The emphasis, however, was different from island to island. In the case of the Maori and Tikopians, chiefs relied on a combination of sacred authority and genealogical seniority. On Samoa and on Easter Island, chiefs relied more heavily on political expertise and military force. In Tonga and Hawaii, which had the highest levels of social inequality, chiefly families utilized the entire playbook: sacred authority, genealogical seniority, military force, and political and economic expertise.

Polynesian societies did not oscillate between ranked and unranked, as the Kachin and Konyak Naga did. The island societies, however, had their own form of cycling: status rivalry. Polygamous chiefly families produced brothers, half brothers, and first cousins who were almost equal in rank. Sometimes the heir to a chiefly office did not control as many warriors as his ambitious junior rival. In such cases assassination, overthrow, and usurpation could cause one chiefly lineage to collapse while another rose.

All three of Goldman’s principles, of course, had antecedents in earlier, achievement-based societies. They had been transformed by changes in social logic, as follows:

  1. Achievement-based groups pursued their own versions of life force. The Naga obtained it from the heads of their enemies. The Mandan obtained it from self-induced suffering. Chiefly Polynesians, however, possessed it from birth and could increase it or lose it depending on their own behavior.

  2. Leaders in achievement-based societies had expertise of various kinds. They could memorize thousands of sacred names, like the villagers of Avatip, or develop skills at moka, like the people of Mt. Hagen. They could master ivory carving or eagle trapping. In the chiefly societies of Polynesia, however, certain craftsmen were more respected than others, for example, the makers of war canoes, purveyors of sumptuary goods, or carvers of giant statues such as those on Easter Island.

  3. In achievement-based societies, bravery in war was already a path to renown. Chiefly societies converted war to a strategy of territorial expansion. Tired of negotiating for the products of a neighboring region, chiefs might just subjugate the region and demand its products as tribute. This enhanced the value of military prowess.

In this chapter we look at three societies with hereditary rank. In the first, sacred authority was paramount. In the second, war was endemic and a chief’s patronage of the crafts enhanced his prestige. In the third, a chief’s mana, toa, and tohunga made him almost as powerful as a king.

We also take note of a change that accompanied the rise of many rank societies: men’s houses were replaced by temples. This change reflects an important social and political transition. Men’s houses were built by clans or Big Men and tended to be places where men sat around communing with their ancestors. Temples tended to be places where actual deities lived on a full-time or part-time basis. Temples were staffed not by initiated clansmen but by people trained as priests. Often the construction of a temple was directed by the chief because, after all, there were supernatural spirits in his ancestry.

THE PREHISTORY OF TIKOPIA

The small island of Tikopia (“Tee-ko-PEE-a”) lies at the western margins of Polynesia. When anthropologist Raymond Firth arrived in 1929, the island had 20-odd lineages grouped into four clans. One lineage in each clan was considered chiefly and provided the
ariki,
or hereditary chief, for its clan. In addition, all four clans and their ariki were ranked relative to one another. The authority of the chiefs was primarily moral and religious; it represented, in other words, an enhanced version of the hierarchy of virtue seen in achievement-based societies.

Tikopia is only three miles long and a mile and a half wide. In 1929 it was occupied by 1,200 people who supported themselves by fishing and cultivating taro, yams, bananas, coconuts, and breadfruit (
Artocarpus
sp.). The breadfruit was stored in pits in the form of a paste.

The people of Tikopia told Firth that over the centuries they had been visited by canoeloads of visitors from island groups such as Samoa, Tonga, and Pukapuka. Almost anyone arriving by canoe had been accepted and protected by one of the chiefs. Not all overseas visitors, however, had been friendly. One group of Tongans in particular had been “fierce, ruthless and even cannibalistic.” Fortunately the Tikopians were able to repel them.

On one occasion an amicable Tongan noble named Te Atafu arrived just when the Tikopian clan called Taumako was facing extinction. Te Atafu was adopted by the Taumako chief, married a highly ranked woman, and helped rejuvenate the clan. Centuries later the Taumako clan still talked about its Tongan connections. Firth came to suspect that Tikopian society “was the result of a fusion of a number of elements from a variety of islands,” but he realized that he had no way to confirm his suspicions without archaeological research.

Fortunately archaeology came to the rescue. In 1977, almost half a century after Firth’s first visit, archaeologist Patrick Kirch and botanist Douglas Yen arrived in Tikopia. Their excavations added nearly 3,000 years to the island’s history.

Kirch and Yen discovered that Tikopia had been colonized 2,900 years ago. Occupation began in the southwestern lowlands and gradually spread to the shores of Te Roto, a saltwater bay. The native plants and animals of Tikopia were in pristine condition at that time. The refuse heaps left by the colonists contained fish, large mollusks, abundant sea turtles, and a wild fowl called the megapode.

The colonists brought with them domestic pigs, chickens, and dogs. Their tools suggest that they had brought cultivated plants as well, although remains of the actual crops had not survived the tropical climate. From the shell of the giant
Tridacna
clam, the colonists made adzes to carve seafaring canoes. They made “peelers” of cowrie shell for use on taro, yams, and breadfruit. They cleared land with fire, practiced shifting cultivation, cooked in earth ovens, and fished with hooks and nets. Their skill at long-distance canoe travel, which had gotten them safely to Tikopia in the first place, kept them supplied with obsidian and stone axes from distant islands.

Over the next 800 years, the colonists had a serious impact on Tikopia’s environment. The island’s original forests were depleted, the megapode was driven to extinction, sea turtles were reduced in number, and mollusk resources were shrinking. As the island’s population grew, the Tikopians increased their pig raising to keep pace with the loss of wild resources.

Beginning 1,000 to 800 years ago, further changes could be seen in the archaeological record of Tikopia. Some of these changes likely reflected the arrival of people from other islands. Agriculture was intensified, with the cultivation of permanent plots replacing shifting cultivation and land clearance by fire.
Tonna
-shell peelers for taro and breadfruit replaced the earlier cowrie-shell peelers. The islanders began digging the type of pit in which breadfruit paste could be stored. Coconuts and
Canarium
nuts showed up in the refuse. With the intensification of agriculture, pigs gradually disappeared from Tikopia. Possibly the hungry pigs had become a threat to the garden plots.

One significant innovation, which occurred roughly 600 years ago, was the introduction of the Tongan-style temple. Such temples were founded on platforms of cut-and-dressed stone masonry, using material quarried from old coral beds. Along with these temples came Tongan-style burial mounds with rectangular, stone-slab-faced foundations. The Tikopians even borrowed the Tongan term
fa’itoka
for such mounds. In other words, Kirch and Yen’s archaeological discoveries support the accounts of the Taumako clan, whose members told Firth that immigrants from Tonga had reached Tikopia and helped rejuvenate them. The archaeological data also supported Firth’s suspicion that Tikopian society, while unique in its own right, had incorporated behaviors from a variety of islands.

Tikopia in 1929: Four Chiefs Are Better Than One

The Tikopians who talked to Firth, of course, told a story of their origins that differed from Kirch and Yen’s. They believed that the first inhabitants of Tikopia were the
atua,
or spirit beings who could assume human form. Not long after, humans appeared. Next came the births of lesser, or tutelary, deities, followed by the
Pu Ma,
or principal twin deities, Tafaki and Karisi. These twin gods became the patrons of the chiefly lineage called Kafika. Tikopian cosmology thus explained why the Kafika lineage was the most highly ranked.

Recall that Tikopian clans were ranked relative to each other, and lineages were ranked within each clan. The chiefs of Clan A came from the Kafika lineage; this clan also had six commoner lineages, distributed through 18 villages. The chiefs of Clan B came from the Tafua lineage; this clan also had five commoner lineages, distributed through 14 villages. The chiefs of Clan C came from the Taumako lineage, famed for its infusion of elite Tongan visitors; Clan C also had seven commoner lineages, distributed through 16 villages. The chief of Clan D, the smallest, came from the Fangarere lineage; this clan had only one commoner lineage, distributed through four villages. Commoner lineages were led by ritual elders, who served as advisers to the chief of their clan.

Because there were four chiefs in place at any one time, Tikopia had no unified central authority. Firth described Tikopian society as a “loosely structured oligarchy,” using the Greek term for rule by a privileged few. The ariki ruled as aristocrats—by virtue and mana rather than by wealth—and one clan’s chief could not impose his will on the other three clans.

Under ordinary circumstances it would have been difficult for an outsider to know that the
ariki Kafika,
or chief of Clan A, was “first among equals.” However, on a second visit to the island in 1952, Firth witnessed a ceremony at which the relative ranks of the four chiefs were on display. At this ceremony colonial officials had come to distribute gifts to all four chiefs, while crowds of their clanspeople watched. The meeting was held on a ritual yard in front of a sacred canoe shed. Each chief sat on a coconut-grating stool so that the seated commoners’ heads would be lower than his.

Firth noted that the placement of each chief’s stool on the yard reflected his rank relative to other chiefs, based on the importance of his clan’s tutelary deities and the length of his genealogy. The ariki Kafika, for example, claimed 19 generations of glorious ancestors, while the ariki Fangarere could claim only eight or nine.

Hereditary chiefs were shown great deference. A commoner delivering a gift to an ariki would touch his nose to the chief’s knee and say, “I eat your excrement ten times.” The chief, for his part, might humble himself to a spirit ancestor by saying, “I eat your excrement.” This act of humility was appropriate because the spirit world was the ultimate source of the chief’s mana. Through his relationship with the spirit ancestors, the chief controlled the natural fertility of gardens, the weather, the health of his human subjects, and the abundance of fish. When a chief called to the mackerel, it approached. When he spoke to the breadfruit tree, it bore fruit. When a chief pointed angrily at a man, the man sickened and died.

Each chief’s authority extended beyond his home village to all the settlements of the district in which members of his clan lived. Anthropologists sometimes refer to the territory controlled by a chief as his “chiefdom.” Note that this term refers to a territory and not to a type of society; Tikopian society should simply be referred to as a rank society. It was, in fact, only one variety of rank society—one in which corporate segments, such as lineages and clans, were ranked relative to each other. In later chapters we will see rank societies in which there was an even more complex ranking of individuals within chiefly lineages.

The ritual buildings on Tikopia reflected its society’s position along the continuum from egalitarian to chiefly. We have already seen that Tongan-style temples were introduced about 600 years ago. These were buildings in which deities were propitiated and carefully memorized chants were recited. However, because the clan was still a very important unit on Tikopia, the island had also retained the bachelors’ house, an institution surviving from earlier and more achievement-based times.

Another link to earlier, achievement-based society was the
pora,
a large feast thrown by each new ariki of the Taumako clan. Each pora involved a huge food outlay, with taro pudding being especially favored. A pora might also be held when the Taumako clan rebuilt its temple. Thus, despite the hereditary authority and mana possessed by the chief, he was expected to put on displays of generosity as great as those of leaders in achievement-based societies.

One other Tikopian institution, this one involving the dead, should be mentioned. In the large nuclear family houses on the island many dead were buried below the house or its eaves, always on the side of the house reserved for ritual. The family would place a coconut-leaf mat over the grave, after which it was taboo to walk there. After a certain number of burials had accumulated, the dwelling might be declared a “house of the dead,” a Tikopian version of the charnel houses found in some ancient villages. The family would then build itself a new home.

Tikopia also provides us with examples of the way bride-price could escalate in rank society. The groom’s family presented gifts to the bride’s parents because they were losing her; to her mother’s brother, who was usually a member of a different clan; and to others who might be classified as the bride’s kin, even though they were not blood relatives. As many as 15 different transactions might be involved at the family, lineage, and clan levels. Most significant, from our perspective, is the fact that gifts were also sent to the chief of the bride’s clan, allegedly to compensate him for the loss of her labor. In effect, the ariki—like the “thigh-eating chiefs” of the Kachin—skimmed off a share of the food and valuables.