The Dawn of Everything - Schismogenesis

Do cultures choose their values in opposition to others?

During the Mesolithic period—the period between the old stone age and the new stone age—societies all over the world began to undergo a process of cultural differentiation. Graeber and Wengrow describe this process in chapter 5, Many Seasons Ago:

[A]fter the end of the last Ice Age, the archaeological record is increasingly characterized by 'culture areas': that is, localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe, rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth. Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. (p. 166)

In this chapter, we want to explore what [drove] processes of cultural subdivision for the greater part of human history. Such processes are crucial to understanding how freedoms, once taken for granted, eventually came to be lost. (p. 170)

To explain the process of cultural differentiation, Graeber and Wengrow introduce the concept of schismogenesis.

The idea behind schismogenesis is that cultures, according to them, often establish their cultural values explicitly in opposition to their immediate neighbors. In other words, cultures define themselves as much by what they are not as what they are: "Those people over there are the ones who do 'X' and we are not."

Schismogenesis is clearly evident inside any given group. However Graeber and Wengrow apply it beyond its original meaning to describe why entire cultures who lived alongside one another were often so often profoundly different, and even sometimes diametrically opposed to one another, despite obvious similarities in ecology and extensive cultural contact. As they ask, "What is it that causes human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours?" (p. 166)

Schismogenesis...describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another...Each society performs a mirror image of the other. In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ago, the necessary and ever-present example of what should never wish to be. (p. 180)…Once again, our intention is simply to treat those who created these forms of culture as intelligent adults capable of reflecting on the social worlds they were building or rejecting. (p. 206)

It's part of the larger idea they are presenting throughout the book: that humans aren't like other creatures whose social structure is dictated by instinct or material circumstances or food availability or population density or other conditions outside of our control. Instead, we humans have the freedom and ability to intentionally choose our own social and political structures any time we feel like, and enshrine whatever social values we choose. Schismogenesis is an extension of that idea.

An Aside on Materialism vs. Idealism

There are two fundamental schools of thought explaining why cultures are the way they are: idealism and materialism.

For social scientists, ‘idealism’ refers to the view that society is shaped and perceived ultimately through the ideas that people have about it, whereas ‘materialism’ refers to the view that society is shaped and perceived through the real underlying material conditions in which people live. Marxist versions of materialism hold that societies progress in determinate ways as a result of internal tensions, and their resolution, grounded in material conditions such as class conflict.

From the dawn of everything to a small farm future: a review of Graeber & Wengrow (Resilience.org)

The materialist approach was pioneered by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century. Marxists defined culture as being comprised of the base and the superstructure. The base is the mode of production and the social and political relations which arise from it (slave-master, patron-client, lord-vassal, employer-employee, etc.). The superstructure is the ideology which arises out those social relationships and underpins the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of the people who engage in those relationships.

Base and superstructure (Wikipedia)

Later, the anthropologist Marvin Harris refined these ideas through an anthropological lens in his book Cultural Materialism. He described societies in terms of a structure, an infrastructure, and a superstructure.

Briefly, the infrastructure consists of the material and energy flows from the environment which sustain any given society. The structure is how different social groups interact; in other words, the political economy. The superstructure consists of the ideological beliefs and suppositions people hold about how their society operates, which is both determined by the previous two categories, even as it influences them in turn. This essay covers these ideas in more detail:

Harris on the Universal Structure of Societies (Rogers State University)

One often-cited example is the use of the plow, first proposed by economist Ester Boserup in 1970. Boserup argued that changing gender relations can be explained by the demands of shifting cultivation compared to plow-based agriculture. Shifting cultivation can be done using simple tools like hoes and digging sticks and was often performed by women in gardening societies. Plow cultivation produces more food per unit of land, but is more capital and labor intensive, requiring significant upper body and grip strength. The introduction of the plow, she argued, put food production entirely in the hands of men, resulting in a loss of status for women in farming societies and the rise of patriarchal institutions.

ALSO: See this: Did Irrigation Entrench the Patriarchy? (The Great Gender Divergence)

A more recent discovery is the effect of rice farming in East Asia. Traditional wet rice cultivation in paddies required more intensive labor than other crops and required cooperation in order to succeed, but produced large surpluses. Cereal crops, on the other hand, required less labor and could be grown on individual plots of land without irrigation if there was sufficient rainfall. Surveys have shown that places where wet rice was traditionally grown have tighter, more interdependent societies and more collectivist social attitudes than places which traditionally grew cereal crops like wheat, millet, sorghum and barley.

Of course, no one would say that food production explains all the differences between various cultures. Virtually no one is exclusively in the materialist or idealist camp: in reality, it's a dial that can be set somewhere between the two. Even if people tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other, they would surely acknowledge the effects of the other on cultural development. I doubt even the Davids would argue that material conditions have no effect on cultures whatsoever.

However, it's clear that one of the main purposes of The Dawn of Everything is to set the dial much further towards the idealist end of the spectrum compared to nearly all of the current literature in anthropology and cultural/political theory.

To make their case, they look at the differences between the indigenous Pacific Northwest Coast communities north of the Klamath River and those further south in the “shatter zone” of northern California. As they describe it, the differences between these cultures cannot be explained by material conditions alone. Instead, they argue, these cultures were different because they adopted differing worldviews explicitly in opposition to the other via self-conscious political choices. In other words, these societies were different not in spite of the the fact that they were so interrelated, but precisely because of it.

If we accept what we call 'society' refers to the mutual creation of human beings, and that 'value' refers to the most conscious aspects of that process, then it really is hard to see the Northwest Coast and California as anything but opposites. People in both regions engaged in extravagant expenditures of labour, but the forms and functions of that labour could not have differed more. (202)

Fisher Kings and Protestant Foragers

The natives of the Pacific Northwest coast relied on the bulk harvesting of aquatic resources, especially salmon and eulachon, which they preserved and consumed in large quantities. People lived in hierarchical clan structures presided over by "fisher kings" who competed against one another in displays of one-upmanship by throwing lavish feasts where food and goods were distributed to their followers. Although ranks and titles could be passed down, there was no single paramount chief, and anthropologists tend to think of these societies as "big man" societies, if especially elaborate ones.

By contrast, the societies of northern California were simple and austere. They valued hard-work, thrift, autonomy, moderation and self-discipline, especially among leaders. They had no inherited ranks or titles. High-status individuals were expected to practice self-denial and work harder than everyone else while saving up money. Individuals were expected to make their own way, and leaders were not expected to give anything away to their followers, unlike in the Pacific Northwest cultures. The annual world-renewal ceremonies were spare and modest compared to the ostentatious "grease feats" further north.

Where the wealthy Yurok were expected to be modest, Kwakiutl chiefs were boastful and vainglorious...Where wealthy Yurok men made little of their ancestry, Northwest Coast households had much in common with the noble houses and dynastic estates of medieval Europe, in which a class of nobles jockeyed for position within the ranks of hereditary privilege, staging dazzling banquets to enhance their reputation and secure their claims to honorific titles and heirloom treasures stretching back to the beginning of time...(180)

Societies in the California shatter zone were equally extravagant in their own way. But if they were potlatching anything, then surely it was labor itself. As one ethnographer wrote of another Yurok neighbor, the Atsugewi: 'The ideal individual was both wealthy and industrious, In the first grey haze of dawn he arose to begin his day's work, never ceasing activity until late at night. Early rising and the ability to go without sleep were great virtues. It was extremely complimentary to say "he doesn't know how to sleep."'

There were no inherited ranks or titles [among the Yurok]. Even those who did inherit wealth continued to emphasize their personal hard work, frugality and achievement; and while the rich were expected to be generous toward the less fortunate and look after their own lands and possessions, responsibilities for sharing and caring were modest in comparison with foraging societies almost everywhere else...(p. 181)

Another major difference was that high-ranking individuals in the Pacific Northwest saw physical labor as undignified, which led to raiding for captives from neighboring villages. The chapter tells us that at one point, up to a quarter of the Northwest Coast population were chattel slaves making it a full-on slave economy on par with classical Athens, the Roman empire, and the antebellum South.

By contrast, their Yurok neighbors fetishized hard work and discipline, and therefore did not partake in slave raiding. In this view, they could be seen as the antithesis of the tribes further north. Where the "fisher kings" presided over elaborate ceremonies featuring conspicuous displays of wealth and excess, Californian tribes behaved more like the Puritans described by sociologist Max Weber.

From the Klamath River northwards, there existed societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which, traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves. This apparently had been true as long as anyone living there could remember.

But none of this was the case further south. How exactly did this happen? How did a boundary emerge between one extended 'family' of foraging societies that habitually raided each other for slaves, and another that did not keep slaves at all?

You might think that would be a lively debate about this among scholars, but, in fact, there isn't...If differences between them are considered at all, they are usually understood as mechanical responses to their contrasting modes of subsistence: aquatic (fish-based) economies, it's argued, simply tended to foster warlike societies, just as terrestrial (acorn-based) economies foraging economies somehow did not. (pp. 176-177)

The Davids reject this mechanistic explanation, preferring instead explain these cultural differences as a result of the Yurok deliberately choosing a different set of values explicitly in opposition to their neighbors on the other side of the Klamath River. These tribes, they say, defined their ethnic identities as a result of what the other tribe was not:

Slavery, we’ve argued, became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce. The ensuing violence seems to have spread until those in what we’ve been calling the ‘shatter zone’ of northern California gradually found themselves obliged to create institutions capable of insulating themselves from it, or at least its worst extremes. A schismogenic process ensued, whereby coastal peoples came to define themselves increasingly against each other. (p. 207)

Despite downplaying the influence of material conditions on cultural forms, they seem to make a very materialist case at the outset. They tell us that slavery, the bulk harvesting of fish, and differences in social rank all start to appear at roughly the same time starting around 1850 BCE. This would seem to be a powerful argument for the influence of material conditions on the social structure:

[O]n the West Coast...we can observe how many of the elements that later came together in the institution of slavery emerged at roughly the same time, starting around 1850 BC, in what's called the Middle Pacific period.

This is where we first observe the bulk harvesting of anadromous fish, an incredibly bounteous resource—later travellers recounted salmon runs so massive one could not see the water for the fish—but one that involved a dramatic intensification of labour demands. It's presumably no coincidence that around this same time, we also see the first signs of warfare and the building of defensive fortifications, and expanding trade networks. (p. 186)

According to behavioral ecology, the bulk harvesting of fish provides an incentive for slavery because processing fish is a very labor-intensive process. The more slaves you have, the more fish you can process, and the richer you become relative to other families and clans. This also led to status differentiation between households, as well as more raiding for slaves. This difference in food production strategies, in turn, leads to the conventional explanation given by most anthropologists as to why these cultures were so different.

Optimal foraging strategy is an approach borrowed from ecology. Humans, just like every other animal, need to obtain food from their environment. They idea is that—all things being equal—any animal will naturally tend to gravitate toward food resources which will supply them the greatest amount of calories (i.e. energy) for the least amount of effort, and humans are no exception. In other words, we (and all other animals) are hard-wired to seek out the most efficient sources of calories in our environment. This can help explain why people choose the food sources they do. These food sources, in turn, can influence the social structure.

Fish are perishable and so have to be preserved immediately by filleting, drying and smoking to last through the winter. Preserved fish provide a large stockpile of surplus wealth that invites raiding from nearby rivals who wanted to claim a share of that surplus for themselves (just like cereals provided in agricultural societies and livestock in pastoral ones).

Acorns, on the other hand, can be harvested and stored in their raw, unprocessed form. When you want to eat them, you have to process them by laboriously soaking, leaching, pounding, and grinding them to make them edible. Carrying off large amounts of nuts, therefore, would make little sense, since you would still have to do all the intensive work of processing them. In the terminology of behavioral ecology, fish are front loaded and nuts are back loaded.

The problem, the Davids tell us, is that the exclusive aim of raiding in the Pacific Northwest was to capture slaves, not food. And they point out that there are no pack animals in this part of North America, meaning that any captured food resources would have to be laboriously hauled back home on foot, which makes raiding for food an unappealing proposition. They dismiss the movement of goods by water: "there’s only so many smoked fish one can pile up in a war canoe." (p. 197) This would appear to obviate the behavioral ecology argument.

But I’m not so sure. Doesn't it make more sense to capture surplus labor rather than surplus food in places where there is no easy way to transport large quantities of food? And since processing fish is so labor intensive, it provides a ready-made incentive for coerced labor.

It's also possible that the Yurok had less need for coerced labor in any case because, once harvested, acorns can be processed only as needed—you don’t have to process them in bulk upfront the way you have to with freshly-caught fish.

This might also contribute to inequality. Typically, societies where raiding and conflict is common tend to be more hierarchical, because hierarchy is the best way to organize a group of warriors for attack and defense. This allows martial leaders to accumulate a great degree of power and influence compared to more peaceful societies. This is consistent with the fact that the Davids tell us that both raiding and warfare were less common among the Californian tribes.

The Davids, however, believe that behavioral ecology cannot adequately explain why the Yurok chose to rely on acorns instead of fish. While the acorns the Yurok relied on as a staple food weren't available in the Pacific Northwest, fish were just as abundant further south, yet the Yurok appear to have deliberately chosen to rely on acorns instead. They argue that this was due to schismogenesis. The reason the Yurok chose to harvest acorns rather than fish was because they valued freedom and hard work in contrast to their neighbors. That is, harvesting acorns was a deliberate choice to discourage raiding, and hence laziness.

[P]opulations directly adjacent to the Californian 'shatter zone' were aware of their northern neighbors and saw them as warlike, and as disposed to a life of luxury based on exploiting the labour of those they subdued...they recognized such exploitation as a possibility in their own societies yet rejected it, since keeping slaves would undermine important social values (they would become 'fat and lazy')...in many key areas of social life, the foragers of this region were indeed building their communities, in good schismogenic fashion, as a kind of mirror image; a conscious inversion of those on the Northwest Coast. (200)

Confusingly, however, the Davids tell us a few pages later that the Yurok did, in fact keep slaves! The difference apparently was that slaves were debt slaves as opposed to chattel slaves captured in raids, and that slave status was not hereditary. Captives seized in battle were redeemed for money right away, allegedly preventing them from forming the kind of permanent slave societies like those further north.

However, it appears that this system allowed certain individuals to manipulate the social structure such that certain families and individuals were turned into debt peons. The reason this was possible was because, unlike most other Californian tribes who ritually destroyed people’s wealth upon death, the Yurok and a few other nearby tribes allowed wealth to be passed down. Meanwhile, other tribes further south in California were somehow able to avoid this situation entirely:

[T]he Yurok and their immediate neighbors were somewhat unusual, even by California standards. Yet they are unusual in contradictory ways. One the one hand, they actually did hold slaves, if few in number. Almost all the peoples of the central and southwest California, the Maidu, Wintu, Pomo and so on, rejected the institution entirely.

[A]lmost everywhere except in the northwest [of California], a man or woman's money and other wealth was ritually burned at death—and as a result, the institution served as an effective leveling mechanism. The Yurok-Karuk-Hupa area was one of the few places where dentalium could actually be inherited. Combine this with the fact that quarrels did lead to war much more frequently here than anywhere else, and you have a kind of shrunken, diminished version of the Northwest Coast ranking system, in this case a tripartite division between wealthy families, ordinary Yurok and paupers. (pp. 203-204)

The overall situation did come to look a bit like a class system as men of inherited wealth often initiated wars, directed the peacemaking ceremonies that followed, and then managed the resulting debt arrangements—in the course of which one class of poorer household would fall into marginal status, its members scattering across the landscape and dissolving into patrilineal bands, while another concentrated as dependents around the victors. However unlike the situation on the Northwest coast, the degree to which grandees could compel their 'slaves' to work was decidedly limited. (559-560)

So it appears that they didn't reject the institution of slavery after all. Also, it seems like they had a similar class structure as their neighbors further north due to the ability to inherit wealth, which hardly makes them "a mirror image of the other," like we were told. This is what makes this chapter so frustrating. It feels like they are just giving us information which confirms their hypothesis and glossing over the rest. In their endnotes, they quote an anthropologist as saying that the institution of slavery among the Yurok "rested on a wholly economic basis." (p. 559).

There is another significant difference between these two cultures which feels oddly neglected: the use of money in one society as opposed to the other.

Money and its Impact

The major difference between the cultures of California and the Pacific Northwest appears to have been economic. The Davids tell us that the cultures of California had one of the most highly sophisticated money economies anywhere in North America, which appears to have developed quite early on¹. While other North American cultures also used money to an extent, the way they used it was quite different from the impersonal market economies that we're used to: "[Money] was almost never used to buy or sell anything. Rather, it was employed to pay fines, and as a way of forming and remembering compacts and agreements." (p. 178)

In northern California, by contrast, there truly was a highly developed monetary economy where shells were fungible tokens used to buy and sell alienable goods. This led to the "Protestant" social values observed among the Yurok reminiscent of those in Northwest Europe:

For [twentieth-century anthropologist Walter] Goldschmidt and members of his anthropological circle the Yurok were famous for the central role that money—which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps—played in every aspect of their social lives...in California...money...seems to have been used in more or less the same way we expect money to have been used: for purchases, rentals, and loans.

In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that—according to Goldschmidt—bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism...

There were no 'capitalists' in the literal sense. What there was, however, was a remarkable cultural emphasis on private property. As Goldschmidt notes, all property, whether natural resources, money or items of wealth, was 'privately' (and for the most part individually) owned', including fishing, hunting and gathering grounds. Individual ownership was complete, with full rights of alienation. Such a highly developed concept of property, Goldschmidt observed, requires the use of money, such that in Northwest California 'money buys everything—wealth, resources, food, honor and wives.' (pp. 178-179)

This might function as an object lesson of what happens when you introduce money into a society, and how it influences attitudes toward work, property, and debt². It makes sense that cultures which—for whatever reason—develop an extensive regime of money and private property rights would eventually come to adopt "Protestant" social values, just as the use of money in Northern Europe by the merchant class inculcated those very same values.

In fact, money itself can be thought of as a kind of "technology." It follows that he trajectory of a society which adopts money would obviously be very different from one which did not, and that this would lead to significant cultural and ideological differences over time—different superstructures in the terminology of Marx and Harris.

Of course, that just pushes the question back further—why did some societies invent money and others didn't? This can't be attributed solely to material factors—anything can be used for money, after all.

The adoption or rejection of money can indeed be due to "self-conscious" choices. For example, according to Plutarch, the Spartans deliberately rejected gold and silver money used by other city-states because it would undermine their social values and insisted on using iron pieces that were so heavy and cumbersome that money was virtually useless. Athens and Sparta are cited as another case of schismogenesis in the chapter.

What I wonder is, couldn't the rejection of slave raiding among the Yurok be explained by the ability to obtain coerced labor through other means, such as debt slavery? For example, a cynic might argue the reason the United States abolished slavery in the nineteenth century was because the wage system provided an easier way to acquire an abundance of exploitable labor for industrialists, whereas the plantation economy of the Confederacy was utterly dependent on slave labor in order to function. On the other hand, one could also argue that the North just "self-consciously" valued freedom more than the South, and that this was a case of “schismogenesis.” That's what’s so frustrating about the concept—it's almost impossible to prove or disprove. It strikes me as a kind of cultural mind-reading. Plus, there might be other reasons why these two cultures chose alternative food production strategies, such as specialization:

First, when different groups in similar environments organize themselves differently, there are other explanations than choice. One is specialization. We fish, you hunt. Hunting and fishing need some level of group-wide coordination: young people must be taught these skills, hunting is done in groups, and so on. So then different societies specialize, but they needn’t consciously decide to. They may just drift down different paths. And trade between the societies would even encourage this.

Think about specialization more broadly. Dawn gives several examples of peaceful agriculturalists growing up next to aristocratic mountain bandits. Again, this needn’t be out of choice. Economists of anarchy can tell stories where people specialize as either producers, who make valuable goods, or bandits who steal from the producers…

The incentives push different groups to do different things, even though they’re in the same environment. (Looked at another way, each group is part of the other group’s environment.)

The Dawn of Everything: a review (Wyclif’s Dust)

There is also the phenomenon of path dependency, where random factors which occurred in the very distant past have unpredictable consequences many generations down the line. For example, places in Africa where the slave trade had a significant impact have lower levels of social trust to this day (people often sold their relatives into slavery for money). Southern Italy, which was ruled for long periods by outsiders, is still more clannish and has less trust in institutions compared to the northern Italy where this was not the case. Parts of Germany which had more pogroms in the Middle Ages produced more votes for the Nazis, and so on. Combine this with cultural inertia, and you have another potent explanation for cultural divergence.

I don't know whether or not this was the case in the Pacific Northwest, but it's certainly possible that things which occurred a long time ago—of which we have no knowledge—continued to influence these societies hundreds, or even thousands, of years later. We just don't know.

In the end, they don't really give us a lot of solid evidence for their schismogenesis theory. The only real evidence appears to be a couple of Yurok folk tales. They also make much of the "clown" figure at Yurok world-renewal ceremonies, whom they describe as an intentional mockery of the values of their ostentatious northern neighbors. But couldn't plain old chauvinism be a simpler explanation?

Ultimately, “cultures” don’t make choices—people do. Cultures are just reified abstractions with no agency. Who was it who was supposedly making these choices, exactly, and who decided? This issue kept coming back to my mind over and over again throughout the book.

I don't doubt that some societies deliberately adopted certain cultural practices to differentiate them from their neighbors. I'm just skeptical that this this was a major factor in the process of cultural differentiation like they are arguing. I don’t see enough evidence that these differences were the result of deliberate choices on the part of these cultures as opposed to alternative explanations.

Agriculture

Graeber and Wengrow also introduce the idea of schismogenesis in anticipation of their discussion about the origins of agriculture. They argue that ecological determinism doesn't adequately explain the adoption or rejection of domesticated crops along the West Coast, and that their absence was just as much a product of deliberate conscious choices made by the peoples who lived there as practical concerns:

...in an area spanning several thousand miles and a wide variety of different ecosystems, it seems unlikely that there was not a single region where maize cultivation would have been advantageous. And if efficiency was the only consideration, once would have to imagine there were some cultigens—beans, squash, pumpkins, watermelon, any one of an endless variety of leafy vegetables—that someone, somewhere along the coast might have found worth adopting.

The systematic rejection of all domesticated foodstuffs is even more striking when one realizes that many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco, as well as other plants…which they used for ritual purposes, or as luxuries consumed only at special feasts. In other words, they were perfectly familiar with the techniques for planting and tending to cultigens. Yet they comprehensively rejected the idea of planting everyday foodstuffs or treating crops as staples. (166)

It raises the possibility that decisions such as weather or not to adopt agriculture weren't just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another. Just the kinds of issues, in fact, which our own post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition tends to express through terms like freedom, responsibility, authority equality, solidarity and justice. (175)

I don't find this entirely implausible. A modern example might be the Amish. Despite the common misconception that the Amish are inherently opposed to technology, the truth is that the Amish make deliberate choices about which new technologies to adopt and which to reject based on the paramount values of their society: equality and modesty. Any technology that could disrupt their society by setting some people apart from others, or set them above others, is rejected. It just so happens that older technologies more closely conform to this ideal.

Also contrary to common perception, not all Amish are the bearded, horse-and-buggy, Old Order Amish, and there are divisions even within that group—for example, the Swartzentruber Amish. The Beachy Amish use many modern technologies and even own automobiles while rejecting things like television and radio. In fact, there are dozens of Amish groups, all of whom make different “self-conscious” decisions about which technologies to adopt and which to reject.

I can certainly imagine similar decisions taking place in the very distant past leading to incipient cultural differentiation. We know that in many forager groups, for example, there needs to be unanimous agreement among all members of a band in order to make a decision. If a consensus cannot be reached, one part of the group breaks off and goes their separate way. This is known as group fission. In fact, the Davids tell us that tribes in the “shatter zone” of northern California appear to have moved into the area from further north around the time slavery was first emerging in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps this was the cause?

An Actual Case of Schismogenesis

Let's look at an actual known case of schismogenesis: the prohibition on pork consumption in the ancient Near East. I'm taking the following from this video by Religion for Breakfast, which is an excellent channel you may want to check out.

Originally, the prohibition of eating pigs was put down to the idea that they were "filthy" or "unclean" because they ate garbage and wallowed in mud and feces; or later, because they harbored the bacteria that causes trichinosis. But the problem with these theories was that many other cultures around the world successfully incorporated pigs into their diet with little problem despite these hygienic issues.

Later, Marvin Harris offered an ecological explanation in his book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. He argued that the prohibition of pigs was a "sound ecological strategy" given the ecology of the Levant. Pigs competed with humans for food in this environment, whereas other livestock did not. Pigs required plentiful shade and water, both of which were scarce in the region. Pigs only became unhygienic at high temperatures, like those found in the Near East. And pigs could not easily be herded over long distances by nomads, nor did they provide valuable secondary products like milk or wool:

[T]he world zones of pastoral nomadism correspond to unforested plains and hills that are too arid for rainfall agriculture and that cannot easily be irrigated. The domestic animals best adapted to these zones are the ruminants—cattle, sheep, and goats. Ruminants have sacks anterior to their stomachs which enable them to digest grass, leaves, and other foods consisting mainly of cellulose more efficiently than other mammals.

The pig, however, is primarily a creature of forests and shaded riverbanks. Although it is omnivorous, its best weight gain is from foods low in cellulose—nuts, fruits, tubers, and especially grains, making it a direct competitor of man. It cannot subsist on grass alone, and nowhere in the world do fully nomadic pastoralists raise significant numbers of pigs.

The pig has the further disadvantage of not being a practical source of milk and being notoriously difficult to herd over long distances....under preindustrial conditions, any animal that is raised for its meat is a luxury. This generalization applies as well to preindustrial pastoralists, who seldom exploit their herds primarily for meat.

Above all the pig is thermodynamically ill-adapted to the hot, dry climate of the Negev, the Jordan Valley, and the other lands of the Bible and the Koran. Compared to cattle, goats and sheep, the pig has an inefficient system for regulating its body temperature...To compensate for its lack of protective hair and its inability to sweat, the pig must dampen its skin with external moisture. It prefers to do this by wallowing in fresh, clean mud, but it will cover its skin with its own urine and feces if nothing else is available. Below 84°F., pigs kept in pens deposit their excreta away from their sleeping and feeding areas, while above 84°F. they begin to excrete indiscriminately throughout the pen. The higher the temperature the "dirtier" they become.

So there is some truth to the theory that the religious uncleanliness of the pig rests upon actual physical dirtiness. Only it is not the nature of the pig to be dirty everywhere; rather it is in the nature of the hot, arid habitat of the Middle East to make the pig maximally dependent upon the cooling effect of its own excrement. (pp. 41-43)

Harris argued that, because raising pigs was such a potential ecological catastrophe, they had to be prohibited in order to remove the temptation to raise them because they were just too delicious. That is, if you looked closely, it was actually a form of ecological knowledge disguised as religious practice. Cows in India, he argued, were a similar case—their secondary products were much too valuable to slaughter them for food.

Later archaeology, however, has found a number of problems with Harris's theory. Archaeological excavations have found that swine were kept successfully all over the ancient Near East for thousands of years, especially in urban settings where they could feed on human waste. Around 4000 BCE, they were one of the most popular domesticated animals anywhere in the ancient Near East, and pig bones persist in archaeological sites down through the ages.

Plus, if pigs were such an ecological disaster, than why were the Jews the only ancient Near Eastern people who prohibited them? There is some truth to Harris's argument—sheep and goats gradually did become more popular than pigs in the Levant probably for the exact reasons he outlines—but it's clearly not the whole story. If pigs were simply too difficult to raise, there wouldn't be any need to ban them, after all.

The most current scholarship paints a different picture. In the immediate aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse, a diverse group of peoples migrated into the southern coastal plain of the Levant from the Aegean. They brought with them many Aegean crafts and customs, including the raising of swine which are ideally suited for maritime colonization because they could be easily transported and reproduce quickly (which is why they are so popular among Pacific Islander peoples). These people eventually became known to us as the Philistines.

Around this same time, tiny farming villages sprang up in the highlands of the Levant. These were possibly a mix of nomadic, semi-nomadic and city-dwelling indigenous Canaanites who had moved into the hilly and sparsely populated interior regions of the Levant. These groups eventually coalesced into a new people who came to be known as the Israelites.

Archaeology shows moderate pig consumption in Philistine towns like Gath, but hardly any pig bones were found in Israelite settlements just a few kilometers away. This has led scholars to hypothesize that the Israelites began to deliberately eschew pig consumption in order to differentiate themselves them from their hated rivals (whose antagonism is well-documented in the Bible). They are the people who raise and eat pigs; we are the people who do not. This was the genesis of the taboo.

Later, raising pigs seems to have regained popularity, especially among the urban poor in the northern kingdom of Israel. Meanwhile, in the southern kingdom of Judah, religious reforms were being undertaken during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. The northern Israelite kingdom was a frequent target of vilification by the Judahite rulers and priesthood, and it was those priests who compiled what would eventually become the Torah.

In the Torah, the prohibition of pig flesh was written into the very religion itself (Leviticus 11). In other words, the southern kingdom of Judah enshrined the pork taboo in order to distinguish themselves from their “errant” northern neighbors based on customs which had originated thousands of years earlier during the rivalry with the Philistines. It seems to have been only sporadically followed, however.

It finally became a defining characteristic of the Jewish people only after they were conquered by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. After Alexander's death, the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV used pig eating as a wedge issue to brutally suppress the Jews and their religion. He sacrificed pigs on the altar of the Temple and forced religious people to eat pig meat under penalty of torture (as described in Second Maccabees). Thus, pork avoidance now became an essential defining feature of the Jewish ethnic identity separating them from their Greek oppressors (whom they eventually overthrew). It has remained so ever since³.

In all of these cases, avoiding pigs was a deliberate choice to distinguish one group of people from another—the proto-Israelites from the Philistines, the people of the southern kingdom of Judah from the northern kingdom of Israel, and the Jews from the Greeks—a clear case of schismogenesis. In this case, we see that materialist explanations alone did not account for the prohibition on pork, even those offered by Harris. Ideas about identity, morality, and “the proper way to live” also played a part, just like the Davids describe. Neither explanation alone gives us the whole story.

But it's important to note that none of these cultures emerged strictly in opposition to the other. Rather, through a long and complex series of historical events, they eventually came to adopt very different cultural practices, beliefs, and attitudes. This was probably true of the Athenians and Spartans was well. As this reviewer points out, "The [schisomogenesis] theory only works if you think about Athens and Sparta as an abstraction without any knowledge of the historical processes that led to the different political systems in those city states."

It's also worth noting that the members of various cultures rarely have rational explanations for why they do certain things, even when there is one. Instead, they usually point to custom or tradition. For example, cultures that nixtamalize corn don't explain it in terms of the bioavailability of niacin, or even claim that not doing so would eventually make you fall ill—they just say that's how their ancestors have always done it. In other words, sometimes even acute cultural differences between peoples are not based on self-conscious reflection or deliberate choices as the Davids are implying, but events lost to the distant past enshrined into the reflexive actions of cultural habit.

This chapter is confusing for another reason. Earlier in the book, they describe the work of Christopher Boehm in rather dismissive terms. But Boehm's depiction of hunter-gatherers provides one of the most potent examples of people "self-consciously" choosing their social arrangements by deliberately avoiding hierarchy. Boehm describes the sophisticated techniques immediate-return hunter-gatherers use to keep potential aggrandizers in check—everything from shaming and ridicule, to banishment, to exchanging arrows during hunting expeditions to obscure who really killed the animal.

The Davids dismiss this in an earlier chapter as somehow "infantilizing" hunter-gatherers, or taking away their political agency; yet this entire chapter is devoted to advancing the argument that the Yurok "self-consciously" chose to reject things like slave raiding and embrace the values of hard work, modesty, and self-discipline. It's a bit inconsistent. Why is one of these societies "self-conscious" while the other is merely "enacting an evolutionary archetype?"

Conclusion

After all this, I find myself sitting on the fence. It's certainly possible that the Yurok and the Kwakiutl chose certain aspects of their society expressly in opposition to their neighbors. It's also possible that these differences arose for entirely different reasons. How can we be sure? It's almost impossible for me to definitively prove that cultural contrasts between any two peoples weren't caused by some sort of deliberate opposition to the other group. In other words, it’s non-falsifiable.

I'm also starting to see this concept already being weaponized. It's a way to dismiss the arguments of your opponents by claiming that they are just deliberately trying to be the opposite of you, rather than because they have any valid arguments or as a result of conscious reflection on their part. Sometimes, of course, that’s true (see this, for example). But the danger is, it can allow you to not even consider whether your opponents might have valid reasons for their beliefs or engage with their arguments in any way.

The schismogenesis idea presented in this chapter has received a disproportionate amount of attention in reviews of the book that I’ve seen. However, I think the popularity of the schismogenesis concept may be more of a reflection our own hyperdivided political atmosphere and seemingly neverending cultural conflicts than the inherent soundness of the concept. I don’t think most reviewers are thinking about schismogenesis in anthropological terms as a source of cultural differentiation the way the Davids are presenting it. As it’s usually described, it's awfully hard to distinguish what makes schismogenesis more than just a fancy word for plain old tribalism, factionalism, sectarianism, and partisanship.

(Sorry about the length; there was no logical point to break this :\. I hope to do some shorter posts in the near future.)

1. Recently, a researcher has found that shell bead money originated among the Chumash of southern California about a thousand years earlier than previously thought—around 2000 years ago. It's possible that it spread north from there.

2. See, for example: A 44-year perspective study: How money brings hunter-gatherers new choices (Phys.org). Graeber previously explored this topic in his Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which makes its absence here more puzzling.

3. In fact, many aspects of Jewish religious practice may be far younger than scholars previously thought. See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/is-judaism-a-younger-religion-than-previously-thought-180981118/

Based on 15 years of studying textual and archaeological evidence, Yonatan Adler of Ariel University, in the West Bank, concludes that ordinary Judeans didn’t consistently celebrate Passover, hold the Sabbath sacred or practice other traditional forms of Jewish ritual until a century or so before the birth of Jesus. If his theory proves correct, then Judaism is, at best, Christianity’s elder sibling and a younger cousin to the religions of ancient Greece and Rome.