Chiefly the parts about Chiefdoms: how prehistoric peoples controlled power
Michael Mann’s Volume 1 is still influential and challenging
Michael Mann wrote:
[My dissent from the evolutionary tale] focuses on the sequence of stages [egalitarian societies to rank societies to the state and to stratification], noting the occurrence of backward or cyclical movement rather than a simple developmental sequence …
… First, general evolutionary theory may be applied to the Neolithic Revolution, but its relevance then diminishes. True, beyond that, we can discern further general evolution as far as “rank societies” and then, in some cases, to temporary state and stratification structures. But then general social evolution ceased … [So, I] suggest that the further general processes were “devolutions” — movement back toward rank and egalitarian societies — and a cyclical process of movement around these structures, failing to reach permanent stratification and state structures. In fact, human beings devoted a considerable part of their cultural and organizational capacities to ensure that further evolution did not occur. They seem not to have wanted to increase their collective powers, because of the distributive powers involved. As stratification and the state were essential components of civilization, general social evolution ceased before the emergence of civilization …
… This argument is reinforced by [an argument about] “society” itself. This emphasizes boundedness, tightness, and constraint: Members of a society interact with one another but not, to anything like the same extent, with outsiders. Societies are limited and exclusive in their social and territorial coverage. Yet we find a discontinuity between civilized and noncivilized social groupings. Virtually no noncivilized groupings discussed in this chapter had or have such exclusivity. Few families belonged for more than a few generations to the same “society”, or if they did, this was constituted by such looseness of boundaries as to be quite unlike historic societies. Most had choices available to them in their allegiances. The looseness of social bonds, and the ability to be free of any particular power network, was the mechanism by which the devolution mentioned above was triggered. In noncivilized societies escape from the social cage was possible. Authority was freely conferred, but recoverable; power, permanent and coercive, was unattainable.
This had a particular consequence when civilized cages did emerge. They were small — the city-state being typical — but they existed in the midst of looser, broader, but nonetheless identifiable, social networks that it is customary to call a “culture”. We shall only understand these cultures — “Summer”, “Egypt”, “China”, and so forth — if we remember that they combined earlier, looser relationships and the new, caged societies …
… The general capacities of human beings faced with their earthly environment gave rise to the first societies — to agriculture, the village, the clan, the lineage, and the chiefdom — but not to civilization, stratification, or the state …
… The effects of ecological specialization amid a developing agriculture are … complex. Some believe that specialization encouraged greater division of labor within a society … If products are exchanged within a village or a kinship structure, commitment to a fixed organization of markets, storehouses, and so forth, is increased. Specialized roles and hierarchical statuses proliferate, and the division of labor and rank hierarchies intensify. But as size, specialization, diffusion, and exchange grew, the contactable world was always larger than could be organized practicably into one group. As the group stabilized, so too did intergroup relations. The difficulty of integrating plowed land with land used for herding encouraged the emergence of relatively specialized agricultural and herding groups. Thus [we can see] the growth of two networks of social interaction, the “group” or “society” and the broader exchanging, diffusing network …
… Power in social groups is not a simple product of the sum of individuals multiplied by their different powers. Societies are actually federations of organizations [emphasis in original]. In stateless groups powerful individuals invariably represent some quasi-autonomous collectivity in a wider field of action — a household, an extended family, a lineage, a genealogical clan, a village, a tribe. Their powers derive from their ability to mobilize the resources of that collectivity …
[But] this type of authority is extremely weak. The chiefs - for there are usually several of them ranged under the nominal headship of one - usually enjoyed negligible powers. The term rank society covers a whole phase of general social evolution … in which power was almost totally confined to the use of "authority" on behalf of the collectivity. All this conferred was status, prestige. Elders, “bigmen", or chiefs could only with difficulty deprive others of scarce, valued resources, and they could never arbitrarily deprive others of subsistence resources. Nor did they possess great wealth. They might distribute wealth around the group, but they could not retain it. As [one writer] comments, “such persons were rich for what they dispensed and not for what they hoarded”. [Another writer] reviewing Amerindians, denies the chief authoritative decision-making powers: He possesses only prestige and eloquence to resolve conflicts — “the chief's word carries no force of law”. The chief is held “prisoner” in that confined role. Collective, not distributive, power is being exercised. The chief is its mouthpiece …
… This overcomes one potential obstacle to the eventual emergence of pronounced inequalities — that of permanence of authority. If it is merely collective power, there is no problem as to who exercises it. The authority role will simply reflect the characteristics of the social structure beneath it. If age and experience are valued in decision making, then an elder may assume the role; if there is material acquisition by the nuclear family, a “bigman”, defined by acquisitive abilities; if lineages are dominant, a hereditary chief. Collective power antedated distributive power. Rank societies preceded stratified societies — and lasted for an enormous period of time. However, this merely puts forward in time our difficulty in explaining how egalitarian societies became inegalitarian in the distribution of scarce and valued resources, especially material resources. In later rank societies, according to the theories, how was consent to equality turned into consent to inequality, or, alternatively, how was consent overridden? There is, as [one writer] notes one answer that seems simple and plausible: Inequality is imposed from outside by physical violence …
… Anthropologists tell us that primitive societies are actually well aware of what might follow [from physical violence, military force] and they take deliberate steps to avoid it. They are “assertively egalitarian”, [one writer] says. The powers of war chiefs are limited in time and scope, precisely so that military authority will not become institutionalized. [Another writer] describes the tragedies of two war chiefs, one the famous Apache Geronimo, the other the Amazonian Fousive. Neither warrior, brave, resourceful, and daring as he was, could maintain his wartime preeminence during peacetime. He could have exercised permanent authority by leading perpetual war parties, but his people soon tired of war and abandoned him …
…[A] time lag exists between the emergence of authority differentials and the territorial, centralized state. States emerged out of associations of clans and lineages, in which an authority division between the clan, lineage, and village elite and the rest was evident. I called them rank, not stratified, societies, however, because they did not embody clear coercive rights or the ability to expropriate. In particular, their higher ranks were productive. Even chiefs produced or herded, combining manual and managerial economic functions. They had particular difficulty in persuading or coercing others to work for them …
[The] dominant explanation offered by contemporary anthropology [is] the redistributive chiefdom … Here is Malinowski:
Throughout the world we would find that the relations between economics and politics are of the same type. The chief, everywhere, acts as a tribal banker, collecting food, storing it, and protecting it, and then using it for the benefit of the whole community. His functions are the prototype of the public finance system and the organization of state treasuries of today. Deprive the chief of his privileges and financial benefits and who suffers most but the whole tribe? [Malinowski, B. 1926. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul, pp. 232-3] …
… As this discussion has revealed, one … assumption permeates most versions of the redistributive state — the dominance of exchange over production, which is relatively neglected. However, it is simple to put this right — for in redistributive chiefdoms the chief is as involved in coordinating production as exchange. Thus, the chief emerges as the organizer of production and exchange where there is a high level of investment in collective labor, a factor whose importance I have repeatedly emphasized …
Let us add ecological specialization. It benefits adjacent specialists not only to exchange but also to coordinate their production levels. If there are at least three such groups coordination can center on an authoritative allocation of value to their products. [One writer using unsystematic case-study materials] pushes this to an explanation of early states. He argues that they coordinated territories containing different “ecological niches”. The chief organized redistribution of the various foodstuffs produced in each. The state was a warehouse, though the redistributive center also acted back along the chain of distribution to affect production relations. The route to generalized exchange and therefore to extensive “property” went through an incipient state. As redistribution increased the surplus, so too it heightened the power of the centralized state. This is an economistic, internalist, and functional theory of the state.
Clan, village, tribe, and lineage elites gradually enforced measures of value onto economic transactions. Authority became necessarily centralized. If it involved ecologically rooted peoples, it was territorially fixed. If it was to be accepted as a fair measure of value, it had to become autonomous of particular interest groups, to be "above" society …
… In archaeology [another writer] has argued for the relevance of the redistributive chiefdom in prehistoric Europe in early Mycenaean Greece and megalithic Malta. In Malta, he argues from the size and distribution of the monumental temples, combined with the known capacities of the agricultural land, for the existence of many neighboring redistributive chiefdoms each coordinating the activities of between 500 and 2,000 people. He also finds such cases in anthropological reports of many Polynesian islands. Finally, he argues that civilization emerged through a growth in the powers of the chief toward the redistributive palace-temple complex ...
This might seem impressive documentation, but in reality it is not … whereas the modern economy involves systematic exchange of specialized subsistence goods, most primitive economies did not … In Polynesia or prehistoric Europe exchanges were between groups who were not highly specialized. Generally they produced similar goods. The exchange was not fundamental to their economy. Sometimes they were exchanging similar goods for ritual purposes. Where they exchanged different, specialized goods these were not usually essential to subsistence, nor were they redistributed for individual consumption among the exchanging chiefs' peoples. More frequently they were used for personal adornment by the chiefs or they were stored and consumed collectively at festive, ritual occasions. They were "prestige," rather than subsistence, goods: Their display brought prestige to their distributor. Chiefs, elders, and bigmen vied in personal display and public feasts, "spending" their resources rather than investing them to produce further power resources and power concentration. It is difficult to see how long-term concentration of power would develop from this rather than short cyclical bursts of concentration, followed by overreaching and dispersal of power among rivals, before another cycle was started. After all, the people had an escape route. If one chief became overweening, they could switch allegiance to another. And this is true even in the few cases where we find genuine, specialized ecological niches and exchanges of subsistence produce. If the form of "society" that precedes the state is not unitary, why should the people develop only one storehouse rather than several competing ones? How do the people lose control? [emphasis in original]
These doubts are reinforced by the archaeological evidence. Archaeologists also find ecological niches to be the exception rather than the rule … Over the landmass of prehistoric Europe, for example, we find few traces of storehouses. We find many burial chambers indicating a chiefly rank, because strewn with costly prestige goods — for example, amber, copper, and battle axes from the mid fourth millennium. In the same societies we dig up indications of great feasts, for example, the bones of a great number of pigs seemingly slaughtered at once. This evidence parallels the anthropological. The redistributive chiefdom was feebler than suggested by its first proponents, a characteristic of rank, not stratified societies.
… Between rank and stratified societies, and between political authority and the coercive state, is an unexplained void …
[Some writers] introduce the distinction between “relative rank” and “absolute rank”. Absolute rank can be measured in terms of distance (usually genealogical distance) from absolute, fixed points, the central chief and through him, the gods. When ceremonial centers appear, absolute rank has also appeared, they say. But they produce no good arguments as to how ceremonial centers become permanent, how relative rank can be permanently converted into absolute rank, and thence permanently, against resistance, into stratification and the state.
The unexplained void still exists …
… All the theories are wrong because they presuppose a general social evolution that had, in fact, stopped. Local history now took over …
From evolution to devolution: Avoiding the state and stratification
What we have puzzled over is how the people were constrained to submit to coercive state power. They would freely give collective, representative authority, to chiefs, elders, and bigmen for purposes ranging from judicial regulation to warfare to feast organization. Chiefs could thence derive considerable rank prestige. But they could not convert that into permanent, coercive power …
Consider, for example, the prehistory of Northwest Europe. Archaeologists can delineate a vague outline of social structures from just after 4000 B.C. to just before 500 B.C. (when the Iron Age introduced massive changes). This is an extremely long passage of time, longer than the whole of the subsequent history of Europe. During this period, with one or two exceptions, western European peoples lived in relatively egalitarian or rank societies, not stratified ones. Their "states" have left no evidence of permanent, coercive powers. In Europe we can discern the dynamics of their development …
… We still boggle at Stonehenge. It involved dragging - for there was no wheel - enormous 50-ton stones over land for at least 30 kilometers, and 5-ton stones over land and sea for 240 kilometers. To lift the largest stones must have required a labor force of 600. Whether the purpose of the monument was equally complex - in religious or calendrical terms - will be forever debated. But the labor coordination and surplus distribution to feed the labor force must have involved considerable centralized authority — a “quasistate” of some size and complexity. Though Stonehenge was the most monumental achievement of the tradition, it does not stand isolated, even today. Avebury, Silbury Hill (the largest earthwork in Europe), and a host of other monuments stretching from Ireland to Malta testify to powers of social organization.
But it was an evolutionary “dead-end" … We have no evidence of later comparable feats of centralized social organization in any of the main areas — Wessex, Brittany, Spain, Malta — until the arrival of the Romans, three millennia later. The dead end may have been paralleled elsewhere among neolithic peoples allover the world. The monuments of Easter Island are similar to those of Malta. Massive earthworks comparable to Silbury Hill dot North America. [One writer] speculates that they resulted from paramount chiefdoms similar to those found among the Cherokee Indians, where 11,000 people spread through about 60 village units, each with a chief, could be mobilized for short-term cooperation. But something within this structure prevented its stabilization …
… Archaeologists see monumental organization as absolute rank dominance by a centralized, lineage elite monopolizing religious ritual; and Beaker organization as relative rank dominance by decentered, overlapping lineage and bigmen elites with lesser authority based on the distribution of prestige goods. Of course, talk of lineages and bigmen is guesswork, based on analogical reasoning from modern Neolithic peoples. It may be that the monumental culture was not lineage-centered at all. It is equally plausible to regard it as a centralized form of primitive democracy in which ritual authority was held by village elders.
But such quibbles cannot obscure the central point. In competition between relatively centralized and decentralized authority, the latter won out, despite the astonishing powers of collective organization of the former. Authority never did consolidate into a coercive state. Instead it fragmented into lineage and village groups whose elites' own authority was precarious. This was not accompanied by social decay. The people mildly prospered. [One writer} suggests that decentralization among the European peoples as a whole was a response to increasing long-distance trade and the circulation of prestige goods. Their distribution enhanced inequality and authority, but not of a permanent, coercive, centralized type …
The history is not one of the evolution of social stratification or the state. Development was not from egalitarian to rank to stratified societies or from equality to political authority to coercive state power …
… Most of the prehistory of society saw no sustained movement toward stratification or the state. Movement toward rank and political authority seems endemic but reversible. Beyond that, nothing sustained.
But we can go farther to identify the cause of the blockage. If most societies have been cages, the doors have been left unlocked for two main actors. First, the people have possessed freedoms. They have rarely given away powers to elites that they could not recover; and when they have, they have had opportunity, or been pressured, to move away physically from that sphere of power. Second, elites have rarely been unitary: Elders, lineage heads, bigmen, and chiefs have possessed overlapping, competitive authorities, viewed one another suspiciously, and exercised those same two freedoms.
Hence there have been two cycles.
[First pattern] Egalitarian peoples can increase intensity of interaction and population density to form large villages with centralized, permanent authority. But they stay broadly democratic. If the authority figures become overmighty, they are deposed. If they have acquired resources such that they cannot be deposed, the people tum their backs on them, find other authorities, or decentralize into smaller familial settlements. Later, centralization may begin again, with the same outcomes.
The second pattern involves more extensive, but less intensive, cooperation in extended lineage structures, typically producing the chiefdom rather than the village. But here, too, allegiance is voluntary, and if the chief abuses this, he is resisted by the people and rival chiefs.
Both patterns presuppose a less unitary form of social life than theorists have generally assumed. It is important to liberate ourselves from modern notions of society. Though it is true that prehistory did show a trend toward more territorially and socially fixed social units, the prehistoric terrain did not consist of a number of discrete, bounded societies. Social units overlapped, and in the areas of overlap authority figures and others could choose membership in alternative social units. The cage was not yet closed.
Thus stabilized, permanent, coercive states and stratification systems did not generally emerge. Let me explain this a little more fully, for it might seem contradicted by [various examples] … True, village heads and chiefs perform useful centralized roles. If efficient, they can acquire considerable authority. This occurred allover Africa … [One writer] notes the minimal coercive powers they possessed and argues that they were merely more centralized versions of prestate lineage authorities. Compliance was largely voluntary, based on a desire for greater efficiency in dispute regulation, marriage arrangements, collective labor organization, the distribution and redistribution of goods, and common defense. Dispute and marriage regulation may be more important chiefly activities than redistributive economies or coordinated military functions, normally requiring a higher level of social organization. The chief can exploit his functionality. The most successful can make despotic claims. They can even acquire surplus to pay armed retainers. This happened in East Africa, and it must have happened countless times in the prehistory of society in all continents.
But what is not general is the despot's ability to institutionalize coercive power, to make it permanent, routine, and independent of his personality. The weak link is that between the king together with his retainers and kinsmen on the one hand and the rest of society on the other. The link is dependent on the personal strength of the monarch. There are no stabilized institutions routinely transferring it to a successor. Such succession rarely occurs, and almost never beyond a couple of generations.
We have good information on the Zulu kingship … [When the chief, Shaka] met the British Empire [he] was crushed. But his empire could not have endured. It remained a federal structure in which the center lacked autonomous power resources over its clients.
In areas where the modern colonial empires found great chiefs … they found two levels of authority. Beneath the Shakas were minor chiefs. In East Africa these "client" chiefs have been documented extensively … Each client chief was a replica of his superiors. When the British entered Uganda they delegated administrative authority to at first 783 and then 1,000 chiefs. Now, on the one hand, this amounts to power space for the forceful would-be monarch: Locality can be played off against locality, client against client, clan against village, chiefs, elders, bigmen, and so forth, against people. It is in this multilayered, decentralized struggle that the chief can exploit his centrality. But on the other hand, the client chiefs can play the same game. The monarch must bring them to court, to exercise personal control over them. But now they, too, acquire the advantage of centralization. It is not a way forward to the institutions of the state, but to an endless cycle of intriguing aspirant rulers, the rise of a formidable despot, and the collapse of his or his son’s "empire" in the face of a rebellion of intriguing chiefs. Choice of authority network undermined the emergence of the social cage represented by civilization, stratification, and the state.
This cycle is an example of the extended kin variant form of rank society. A second cycle would be characteristic of the village variant form: toward greater central authority with the capacity to manage, at its peak, Stonehenge-type structures, then overextension and fragmentation toward more decentralized households. Perhaps most common would be a mixed type where village and kin intermingled, the dynamic of their intermingling added to the hierarchical dynamic. A good example would be the political systems of Burma, described by [another writer], in which hierarchical and egalitarian local political systems coexist and oscillate, the presence and influence of both preventing any single type of stratification from becoming thoroughly institutionalized.
Perhaps the Shakas and the Geronimos were the dominant personalities of prehistory. But they did not found states or stratification systems. They lacked sufficient caging resources.
… we will see that where those resources developed this was the result of local sets of circumstances. No general social evolution occurred beyond the rank societies of early, settled neolithic societies [emphasis in original].
The Source:
Michael Mann, The sources of social power: Volume 1, A history of power from the beginning to AD 1760, Cambridge [1986] 2012 [pp. 38-40, 46, 52-3, 56, 59-70]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.