Chiefdoms
Examples of “Regional Polities”
Some comments on J&E’s assessment of regional
polities
• Underestimate the size of acephalous
societies
• Overestimate
need for formal
organization
up to societies
~ 10,000 people
Macroevolution again
• Population pressure can’t 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
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
Historical examples of socialorganizational 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
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
Austronesian phenomenon:
Patrick Kirch (2000) On the Road of the Winds
Language map
Lapita Phenomenon
Lapita pottery
very diagnostic
(oddly,
Polynesians in
the E. Lapita
realm later
abandon
pottery!)
Lapita expansion very
rapid
Core technology:
basic tropical horticulture plus
Lapita navigation strategy
Sailing leeward vs
windward. Safe
to beat to
windward. If you
get into trouble
you can sail a jury
rigged canoe
downwind home.
Austronesian
sailors could
point fairly
close to the
wind
Austronesian exploration stategy
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!
The Functions of Chiefs
• “Domestic tranquility”—suppression of smallscale 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 (?)
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
The Trobriand Islands Case
Pioneering ethnographer Bronislaw
Malinowski studied Trobrianders 19141917
Subsistence: tropical horticulture &
fishing
Gardening highly ritualized
Rather intricate gender division of labor
in gardening
Mature garden
Fishing major protein source
Stratified social organization
Chief Touluwa
Chief and his storehouse
Ceremonial display of harvest
Modern yam
shelter
Kula Trade system
Kula
Ring
Kula
trade
Ring
trade
Armband
Necklaces
Ceremonial trade
Substantial canoes carry mundane cargo:
clay pots, fine stone
Kula “market”
Evolution of Chiefdoms in Polynesia
Rather Diverse
Open systems: small, highly competitive chiefdoms
Near-state systems
Tonga-Samoa: Division of religious and secular
authority
Hawai’i: Class-based distinctions
Marquesian Open Sytem
Easter Island: Collapse of open system
Hawai’i
• 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
Chiefly display: feather cloaks
Economic intensification under chiefly
supervision
Reef-flat fishponds
Pond-field irrigation systems
Population equilibrium?
Basseri
Notable features
Pastoral tribe
Component of state
Tribal chief part of state elite
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