The Village and the Clan
Tribal societies were the dominant form of human social organization for thousands of years
Last time we saw that all around the world with the onset of the stable Holocene climatic period, people all around the world settled down and started growing plants as their primary food source. In doing so, they turned their backs on immediate return hunting and gathering—a process anthropologists call intensification. Wild food resources still played a role in many diets, however.
Band societies survived into modern times in the very remotest and most marginal regions of the globe where growing plants was impractical such as the high Arctic and the Kalahari and central Australian deserts. But the vast majority of societies encountered by anthropologists have been tribal societies. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins noted, "...it was the Neolithic Revolution that ushered in the dominance of the tribal form, that precipitated great sectors of the cultural world to a new level of general standing. Even in modern times tribes operating on a simple neolithic base have comprised a significant portion of ethnographically-known cultures." [1]
Moffett describes tribal societies as broadly very similar to band societies, with the major difference being that they were now permanently anchored to one spot—the village—instead of nomadic bands. In place of temporary shelters they built permanent structures like huts and treehouses from wood, thatch, stone, and wattle-and-daub. Situated near the village were the garden plots where crops were grown. Investments in the landscape like irrigation ditches were more complex. Other societies herded domesticated livestock, retaining their mobility and relying on temporary shelters like wagons, tipis, yurts and tents.
Just as the band society was partitioned among several different bands, tribal societies were partitioned among several different villages scattered around their territory. Just like a band society, a tribal society was a circumscribed ethno-lingusitic group that distinguished its members from outsiders through the use of markers. Just as anthropologists often looked at the behavior of solitary bands while neglecting band societies, they also tended to look at individual villages without taking into account the dynamics of the wider tribal society:
The structural and functional equivalent of a nomadic hunter-gatherer society was such a regional cluster of settled people—call it a tribal or village society.
In some situations, one such village was all there was to a society. Often, however, there was a grouping above the village...As anthropologists have often underappreciated band societies on favor of studying bands, the individual village has similarly been a centerpiece of anthropological research, rather than all the villages collectively.
This bias in attention is due, firstly, to the autonomy of the villages. No outsider, even from another village of the tribe, told the village residents what to do, any more than one band of hunter-gatherers had any say over another. But another reason researchers have focused on the village as the level of study is that the relationships between villages can be dramatic: villages were often famed for their conflicts with each other, including, among the Yanomami, revenge killings...(279)
Each village in tribal societies was economically and politically autonomous, and functioned as an independent social unit. Such societies are often referred to as segmentary societies. Band societies were also a type of segmentary society.
A segmentary society is comprised of more-or-less equal parts with economic and political autonomy. Each segment controls its own productive resources and manages it own affairs. Each segment in a segmentary society is basically a replica of every other one, with no particular segment dominant over all the others. A segment will act collectively in defense of its property or persons. The primary segment was the highest level of political authority above the nuclear family—it could be a single village, or it could be partitioned among multiple villages. Segmentary societies could grow by adding new segments, like a freight train, but there was no hegemonic political organization to tie all the segments together.
A band is a simple association of families, but a tribe is an association of kin groups which are themselves composed of families...we may...view a tribe as a coalescence of multi-family groups each on the order of a band. A tribe is a segmental organization. It is comprised of a number of equivalent, unspecialized multifamily groups, each the structural duplicate of the other: a tribe is a congeries of equal kin group blocks. [1]
Tribal societies are often referred to as acephalous societies—that is, societies lacking a single leader or a central government. The phrase "take me to your leader" would make no sense in an acephalous society beyond the local village. Unlike in chiefdoms or states, there was no hierarchy of settlements. Some villages were often much larger than others, yet despite the differences in size no village exercised political control over another. Villages commonly had a headman—often erroneously referred to as a "chief"—but the headman was not a formal role and lacked coercive authority; he was more like a"big man" than a chief in the true sense of the term. This distinguished tribes from chiefdoms, which did have formal—often hereditary—leaders, centralized governments and coercive authority.
Some sort of centralized management for dealing with social issues is all but assured in human settlements, even if rudimentary in the simplest of them. As I described earlier for settled hunter-gatherers, people ensconced in one place had more patience for displays of authority than hunter-gatherers did in bands—yet often just a bit more patience; each village tended to have a headman, but his significance came to the fore during conflicts, and even then he spent most of his time convincing people rather than leading them. (278)
The political fragmentation of tribal societies was possible due to the simplicity of the horticultural method of production. Because villages were basically self-sufficient when it came to things like food, water, clothing, shelter, know-how, and so forth, there was no need for any higher political organization to coordinate efforts beyond the local group or village.
Even without an institutionalized hierarchy or a central source of authority, the members of tribal societies, just like those of band societies, were united by a shared culture defined by markers such as a common language and religion. These markers were consistently reaffirmed though rituals, ceremonies, feasts, marriages and trade. There were also pan-tribal institutions which cut across the various segments such as age grades and bachelor’s associations. Because each primary segment was autonomous, solidarity within tribal societies was regarded as mechanical, as opposed to organic, wherein which all members of a society are interdependent on one another for their basic needs such as in modern industrial societies.
A tribe as a whole is normally not a political organization but rather a social-cultural ethnic entity. It is held together principally by likenesses among it segments (mechanical solidarity) and by pan-tribal institutions, such as a system of intermarrying clans, age-grades, or military and religious societies which cut across primary segments. Pan-tribal institutions make a tribe a more integrated social organism than a group of intermarrying bands, but tribes as such virtually lack organic solidarity.
A tribe may well consider itself one people, often enough the people, but a system of order uniting the various kin segments and representing the interests of the whole rather than the several interests of the parts is at best only ephemerally achieved—characteristically it is never achieved. [2]
Fission-fusion still operated in tribal societies, although once people had invested large amounts of labor in things like garden plots and permanent houses it was much harder to leave one village and establish yourself in another, unlike with bands, so people tended to stay put. Tribes did unite for the purposes of mutual attack and defense, often putting a temporary leader in charge, however, these power structures typically dissolved once the conflict ceased.
Life in a tribe could be one big soap opera. As among other settled hunter-gatherers, there was no shortage of occasions for petty squabbling and violence. Conflicts included disputes over matters that might spoil a family reunion, such as what’s for supper, but also accusations of sorcery, fights over spouses, and arguments about the distribution of responsibility. These disagreements could precipitate the breakup of a village, the people at times becoming so disgruntled they moved far off to avoid each other as much as possible. (277)
[V]illages continually renegotiated their relationships. Fights alternated with reconciliations involving marriages, feasts or trade...as with members of hunter-gatherer bands, people could relocate to another village—although villagers, committed to tending a garden...accomplished such a move less readily than did the nomads who foraged unencumbered for wild foods.
Indeed, much a villager could change village [sic], whole villages could fuse. These dynamics worked as they did for bands of hunter-gatherers, with the fissioning and fusioning of villages driven by social relationships. The biggest distinction between village societies and band societies is simply that villages changed their locations (usually to freshly cleared gardening spots) and split and combined less often. (279-280)
Moffett notes that villages tended to never exceed a certain size limitation based on the density. If villages got too large, members of a village would split off and form another one. Villages also tended to have a finite life span, with some villages being abandoned over time and others fusing together into larger settlements. In this characteristic, villages were quite similar to the fission-fusion dynamic of bands, which also tended to break apart and recombine over time.
As for tribal peoples that live in settlements—whether they survive by hunting and gathering, gardening, or gasoline-fueled agriculture—social friction has limited their populations at one place to something on the order of a hundred or several hundred individuals, up to a few thousand for New Guinea highlanders, who spaced their homes out in a way that I imagine reduced strife. A Yanomami village in the South American rainforest, where by contrast everyone hammocked almost on top of each other in an oval shelter, was often smaller, with as few as 30 but up to 300 members. (279)
Prehistoric villages in the American Southwest…typically lasted from 15 to 70 years. An example of village fissioning is that practiced by the Hutterites…Hutterites emigrated in 1874 from Russia to the American West, where they live in colonies of up to 175, each of which operated a farm. Social stresses rise as a colony grows, until finally the members arrange for the colony to split, an adjustment made on average very 14 years. Although these transtions are handled in a more orderly fashion than the fissioning of preliterate villages, the dynamics are much the same. (277-278)
Once you had things like garden plots, permanent structures, storable surplus and personal property; you needed some way to assign who owned what, who had rights to what, who worked for whom, and how such things were passed down over time. The way tribal societies universally accomplished this in the absence of formal political and legal institutions was by kinship.
Kinship
So far, I've said very little about kinship. Although respect was often paid to their ancestors, the members of band societies typically didn't place a whole lot of importance on kinship.
Band members interacted with their immediate relatives such as parents and siblings. They may have also had significant relationships with more distant family members like aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents—especially when it came to raising children—but that's about it.
In this respect, band societies are actually more like our own modern-day societies, where friendships play a more important role than our extended families. This may be because, just like the members of band societies, we tend to move around a lot. Instead, societal markers were far more important to the members of band societies than blood relations:
A band society contained many family lines, with friendships driving social choices as much as, if not more than, kinship. A couple customarily raised their kids in the same band that was occupied by one or the other set of grandparents and possibly a sibling or two. Otherwise, their relations—the families of their brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles—were spread among the society's bands.
What kept a band together was compatibility. As with other fission-fusion species, people seek out likeminded others. (207)...This may explain why, even though Bushmen valued close relatives such as their genetic parents, grandparents and siblings, their languages had no word for family. (210)
As far as hunter-gatherers were concerned, culture and other markers trumped genetics. Families in some American Indian tribes could adopt children taken in battle, a practice that beefed up the tribal reserve of warriors. What bound adoptees to the tribe wasn't blood but their adherence to tribal ways learned alongside other children. This shared upbringing meant that both the families and their societies were culturally uniform and genetically diverse. (209-210)
As the above passage indicates, it's important to understand is that kinship is not primarily about genetics. It's not even, strictly speaking, about who you're actually related to! After all, your cousins share just 12.5 percent of your DNA, and your second cousins a mere 3 percent. There’s no real reason you should favor them over people like close friends and allies.
Unique social structure of hunter-gatherers explained (Phys.org)
While kinship is often portrayed as somehow "natural," determining one's family connections can be a difficult and mentally challenging task, as Moffett points out citing the old novelty song by Ray Stevens, I'm My Own Grandpa. It's also difficult to determine exactly who we're related to based on physical appearances alone (see this, for example). While we do instinctively distinguish members of our own society from outsiders based on behaviors and physical characteristics, accurately picking out our relatives and sorting them into the complex categories that are part and parcel of kinship terminology does not at all come naturally for us. Rather, it is a cultural phenomenon that must be learned.
An intimate knowledge of kin relationships doesn't seem to be essential for human life. Much like tribes that have no words for numbers beyond one and two, some societies are less obsessed than others with sorting out these tangles of kinship...(208)...For the most part...animals pursue social connections and not biological families as such. (207)
Evidence from the animal kingdom and human world alike suggest that understanding and keeping track of kin and understanding and keeping track of society members are distinct tasks, generally carried out to navigate different, though at times overlapping, problems and solutions. (204)...the familial connections that are recognized in a given society take years of training to comprehend, yet a three month old, too young to speak, deftly detects members of societies or ethnicities. (209)
Understanding kinship can be as arduous as memorizing multiplication tables, with the caveat that while multiplication is the same anywhere mathematics is taught, what children learn about kin depends on what their society requires of them...
Residents of part of eastern Polynesia have just a few terms expressing kinship. The Amazonian Pirahã tribe is even more stripped down, having a single word that applies to both parents, all four grandparents, and all eight great-grandparents. Their one word for "child" is used for grandchildren and great-grandchildren, too, while the word for "siblings" applies as well to the parents' siblings and the children of siblings… (208-209)
The complexity of kinship groups varies greatly from culture to culture. As Moffett notes above, some are quite simple like those of Polynesia or among the Pirahã. Others can be mind-bendingly complex. Anybody can theoretically be incorporated into your kinship circle, even if they are not related to you in the slightest*, a phenomenon known as fictive kinship. Fictive kinship demonstrates that kinship is primarily about terminology rather than ancestry or genetics:
What did play a role among hunter-gatherers was the terminology associated with kinship. In band societies, fictive kinship, sometimes called cultural kinship, was commonplace, a method of giving each person a symbolic relationship to others. Thus, people used words such as "father" or "uncle" to address fellow society members, and all fathers and uncles were equal.
When Bushmen spoke of kin, they didn't necessarily mean a blood relative. What they often had in mind was anyone sharing a given name, which bespoke this fictive connection. A man couldn't marry a woman who was considered his sister no matter how distantly related.
The primary value of fictive kinship was to maintain social networks based around rules concerning everything from monumental issues, like marriage, to such details as who should exchange gifts with whom...(210)...kinship truly was metaphoric among hunter-gatherer bands, having little to do with blood—and their societies even less so. (212)
Although there are an almost infinite variety of kinship schemes in various cultures around the world, anthropologists have classified them into six major categories: Hawaiian, Eskimo, Sudanese, Crow, Omaha, and Iroquois after their eponymous tribes. The major difference between them is whether they distinguish parallel cousins from cross-cousins, and whether descent is recognized unilaterally or bilaterally—that is, through one or both parents.
The reasons why these naming systems differ have yet to be explained satisfactorily. Nonetheless, given that one of their most important functions is to specify who can marry whom, it is likely that they reflect local variations in mating and inheritance patterns. The Crow and Omaha kinship naming systems, for example, are mirror images of each and seem to be a consequence of differing levels of paternity certainty (as a result, one society is patrilineal, the other matrilineal).
Some of these may be accidents of cultural history, while others may be due to the exigencies of the local ecology. Kinship naming systems are especially important, for example, when there are monopolizable resources like land that can be passed on from one generation to the next and it becomes crucial to know just who is entitled, by descent, to inherit. [3]
Due to the existence of fictive kinship, its often argued that kinship has nothing whatsoever to do with genetics or biology. However, this is based on a naive understanding of kinship. Kinship has just as much to do with our descendants as it does with our ancestors, as evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explains:
In English, we classify in-laws (who are biologically unrelated to us) using the same kin terms that we use for real biological relatives (father-in-law, sister-in-law, etc.). However...we actually treat them, in emotional terms, as though they were real biological kin, and we do so for a very good biological reason: they share with us a common genetic interest in the next generation. We tend to think of genetic relatedness as reflecting past history...But in fact, biologically speaking, this isn't really the issue, although it is a convenient approximation for deciding who is related to whom.
In an exceptionally insightful but rarely appreciated book (mainly because it is very heavy on maths), Austen Hughes showed that the real issue in kinship is not relatedness back in time but relatedness to future offspring. In-laws have just as much stake in the offspring of a marriage as any other relative, and hence should be treated as though they are biological relatives. Hughes showed that this more sophisticated interpretation of biological relatedness readily explains a large number of ethnographic examples of kinship naming and co-residence that anthropologists have viewed as biologically inexplicable.
The second point is that in traditional small-scale societies everyone in the community is kin, whether by descent or by marriage; those few who aren't soon become so by marrying someone or by being given some appropriate status as fictive or adoptive kin. The fact that some people are misclassified as kin or a few strangers are granted fictional kinship status is not evidence that kinship naming systems do not follow biological principles...everything in biology is statistical rather than absolute...[4]
The "magic number" of 150 people which appears to be the maximum size of human social groups illuminated by Dunbar himself (i.e. "Dunbar's Number") may be an outgrowth of the way humans recognize and sort kinship relations. Language itself may have even evolved partly in order to classify various kin relationships into different categories. In this view, kinship becomes a sort of "mental shortcut" that proscribes social relationships between strangers in anonymous societies:
It may be no coincidence that 150 individuals is almost exactly the number of living descendants (i.e. members of the three currently living generations: grandparents, parents and children) of a single ancestral pair two generations back (i.e. the great-grandparents) in a society with exogamy (mates of one sex come from outside the community, while the other sex remains for life in the community into which it was born).
This is about as far back as anyone in the community can have personal knowledge about who is whose offspring so as to be able to vouch for how everyone is related to each other. It is striking that no kinship naming system identifies kin beyond this extended pedigree with its natural boundary at the community of 150 individuals. So it seems as though our kinship naming systems may be explicitly designed to keep track of and maintain knowledge about the members of natural human communities. [5]
Kinship became much more important once there was some form of tangible wealth and property that could be passed down through the generations. This could be anything from garden plots in horticultural societies, to fishing rocks in settled hunter-gatherer societies, to livestock in nomadic pastoral societies. The terminology surrounding kinship was pressed into service and greatly expanded to adjudicate these issues in the absence of formal laws and governments.
If bands of hunter-gatherers thought so little about actual genealogies, where did our current obsession with, and dependence on, extended family relationships come from? Family trees became a concern for hunter-gatherers who abandoned the lifestyle of owning no more than they could carry.
Settled peoples who stood to inherit a social position and material items had good reason to know their family trees. Likewise, in industrial societies, extended families have been most nurtured where there is wealth to share. The very size of those societies also puts a premium on people reliably building a broad set of relationships and kin networks represent a consistently available avenue for people to do that.
The learned skill to conceive of extended families—and to keep track of, and value, those relationships—has been a recent add-on in human evolution. It requires complex communication and learning and is heavily dependent upon what each society expects. (211)
In tribal societies, corporate groups become the preeminent body of social interaction, taking the place of the band in band societies. We are used to the word “corporate” in the context of giant business corporations. But the word corporate simply refers to any imaginary entity that has an existance seperate and distinct from the individuals who comprise it; whose membership changes over time; and whose lifespan is not limited in duration.
Clans and Lineages
While groupings in band societies were typically no larger than extended families, tribal societies were dominated by corporate kin groups. These go by a variety of different names which are used inconsistently even by professional anthropologists: clans, subclans, lineages, gentes, phratries, kindreds, sibs, cohorts, skins, moieties, and many others. In tribal societies, kinship defined one's personal relationships and group associations.
Nuclear and extended families were grouped together into clans or sibs, which were further divided into subclans and lineages. Clans were sometimes grouped into larger associations such as kindreds, moieties or phratries. Such groups reinforce the notion that humans, like many other animals, live in multilevel societies. Clans and lineages were based on one's purported descent from a common ancestor, often of notable or heroic (or even divine) origin.
In most societies, descent was reckoned through a single gender; something known as unilinear descent. This was because you needed to assign people to either one lineage or the other with no overlap, something that is not possible if descent is recognized through both genders—a.k.a. bilateral descent—which is how we do it in most societes today.
Descent groups which trace ancestry through fathers are called patrilineal, or agnatic, while those that trace descent through mothers are called matrilineal, or enatic. Ambilineal, or cognatic, means tracing descent through either parent, or both. In a patrilineal descent group, all members of the group aside from unmarried daughters will be fathers; in matrilineal groups, all members will be mothers except for unmarried sons.
The corporate kin group, then, is the basic unit of tribal societies. One's status and social relationships with other members of the tribe were specified based on precise genealogical rules known to all members. Members of the same descent group would often live together in communal houses, such as the longhouses of the Iroquois whose society was based around matrilineal clans. Resources which were essential to the tribes' ongoing existence**, things such as land, houses, fishing equipment, food processing equipment, canoes, storage facilities, and so forth—were collectively owned by corporate kin groups rather than individually.
…the formation of clans and lineages distinguishes the organization of the local group from the less formalized organization of the family level...Clans and lineages in most local group societies are corporate—they own something, most crucially land. They delimit group territories by controlling access to scarce, highly productive resources.
The corporateness of the descent group arises from increased competition over resources and the consequent need for strength in numbers to regulate and defend access. In a world without regional legal institutions to guarantee access, the corporate descent group declares the legitimacy of its members' claims, justifying them by ancestral ties to the land. [6]
Lacking formal systems of law or government, elaborate genealogical rules based around kinship—real or imaginary—specified everything from the ownership of productive resources, to political alliances, to marriage and inheritance rules, and—perhaps most importantly—who could command the labor of others. This duty to provide labor and render assistance based on kinship constituted what Eric Wolf called the kinship mode of production, which he defined as,
...a way of committing social labor to the transformation of nature through appeals to filiation and marriage, and to consanguinity and affinity. Put simply, through kinship social labor is "locked up," or "embedded," in particular relations between people. This labor can be mobilized only through access to people, such access being defined symbolically.
Kinship thus involves (a) symbolic constructs ('filiation/marriage; consanguinity/affinity') that (b) continually place actors, born and recruited, (c) into social relations with one another. These social relations (d) permit people in variable ways to call on the share of social labor carried by each, in order to (e) effect the necessary transformations of nature. [7]
Wolf contrasted this with the tributary mode of production, which involved the extraction of wealth and resources by a dominant group from a subjugated one, which became the dominant economic form of later chiefdoms, empires, and archaic states (the capitalist mode of production is obviously the one most of us live under today).
Marriages could only be arranged between lineages, because members of the same lineage were considered to be siblings, and thus inappropriate for marriage. Marriages tied the various clans and lineages together in complex webs of kinship, known as affinal kinship.
Marriages between clans and lineages were usually accompanied by some sort of wealth exchange. Women in tribal societies were considered valuable resources due to their reproductive and labor capabilities, so the loss a woman from her clan was accompanied by a bride-price paid by the groom's clan. In other cultures, brideservice—labor performed by the groom on behalf of the bride's family for a specified period of time—was required instead. Upon marriage, one would leave the descent group of their birth and become a member of their spouse's lineage, depending on whether the society was patrilineal or matrilineal. Residence with the bride's family was matrilocal; with the groom's family, patrilocal; in a separate residence, neolocal.
It should be obvious the primary purpose of marriage is acquiring in-laws rather than mere reproduction. All you need for reproduction is sex, which clearly does not require marriage. Some animals have pair-bonding, but only humans, with their complex kinship relations have marriage, which is universal in tribal societies.
In tribal societies, an offense against any individual is considered to be an offense against their entire kin group. The offender’s kin group is held liable for restitution. To avoid spiraling into blood feuds, the offended party would receive stipulated payments from the guilty party. The amount of the fine would be precisely determined, with headmen acting as mediators. The emphasis was on restoring social harmony: restorative justice instead of retributive justice. The emphasis was on reintegrating the offender back into society rather than punishment. There is good evidence that such restitution payments (weregild) formed the primordial basis for money and market exchange—a topic for another time. A recent study of the Enga found that restorative justice was far more successful than the retributive justice model practiced by states:
Restorative justice preferred among the Enga (University of Utah)
All adult members of a corporate kin group were expected to make material contributions for weddings and conflict resolution. Such contributions determined your social standing in the group. Although couched in the language of voluntary donations, such contributions were, in fact, obligatory. Members were also expected to contribute food and labor for feasting and other ceremonial activities such as rituals and life-cycle celebrations (i.e. birthdays). They were also expected to take up arms for their lineage in battle.
Although the primary interactions in tribal societies were with the members of one’s own kin group, there were all sort of mechanisms through which the groups were socially integrated, the most common ones being marriage and debt. As mentioned earlier, pan-tribal institutions, or sodalities, cut across the various kinship groups and helped maintain ongoing solidarity between tribal segments.
One common institution seen in many societies was the men's house, where men (and only men) over a certain age would come together in a clubhouse to commune with their ancestors and engage in esoteric rituals which were closed to outsiders. Some anthropologists see men's houses as the earliest sign of the transition to ranked societies, with men’s lodges as the forerunners of temples.
Although the corporate kin group utilizes every symbolic and and ceremonial means at its disposal to extend the sense of group obligation outward by activating ancestral ties (ever more distant links of common descent), the tendency of corporate groups is to be inward-looking, as bent on excluding some as on including others.
In order to overcome the narrow inwardness of groups built on the principle of common descent, local groups use a variety of institutional means to create cross-cutting affiliations between descent groups. The two most powerful and pervasive of these are marriage and debt...
In addition to the personal networks created by marriage, the exchange of spouses plays a central role in a larger process of creating debt and credit between local groups. Marriages are typically viewed as a gift of a bride or groom from one descent group to the other...To accept a gift is to agree to be in debt, and this debt creates or reinforces a social connection. Among the functions of the leader of a local group is to remember these debts and credits and to guide group behavior toward fulfilling obligations and maintaining social ties with other local groups. [8]
Kin-based groups were not the only type of corporate group in tribal societies. Many societies also sorted people into age-grades and age-cohorts. An age cohort is a collection of people all born around the same time who remain in the group throughout their lives, like the designations of the Chinese Zodiac. Age grades were similar to grades in elementary school, where members progressed through the various levels as they aged, with attendant duties for each age grade.
Clans and lineages tended to develop their own distinctive markers apart from those of the wider tribe such as dances, stories, songs and artwork. For example, some lineages in the Pacific Northwest owned particular crests with unique designs. Sometimes lineages were associated with particular animals called totems, in which the spirit of the clan was embodied in a specific animal†.
We can visualize tribal societies, then, as a sort of net or fabric, with the lineal descent groups acting as the threads, and the various crosswise linkages between them—such as marriage, feasts, debts, ceremonies, and other institutions—as the strands weaving the fabric together, as noted by Earle and Johnson:
If we imagine a fishnet held up to view, the vertical strands (the warp of a textile) would be the lines of descent embodied in corporate groups, and the horizontal strands (the woof) would be the cross-cutting linkages created by marriage that is the web of kinship.
The web is enhanced still further by other prestations: lavish feasting with grandiose displays of generosity (creating debt) are the most famous, but smaller exchanges of utilitarian objects, payments of wealth to mollify injured feelings, and sharing windfalls of produce all do their part to strengthen the web of kinship. [9]
One notable feature of lineages is that, the further back one goes in time, the more likely one is to find an ancestor in common between functionally independent lineages. If you go back far enough, there is usually even a remote ancestor common to all members the tribe. This allows for temporary alliances to form between the various tribal segments, usually for the purposes of either predatory expansion or mutual defense, somewhat like Voltron (or the Wu-Tang Clan).
This is the primary feature of a segmentary lineage system, which features a hierarchy of lineages that contain both close and relatively distant family members. The classic example are the Nuer pastoralists of Sudan. Lineages fought with other lineages at the same level, usually over cattle, but they could then combine with one another to fight at a higher level. In this case, this was done in order to expand into lands inhabited by the Dinka, their territorial rivals, who were organized similarly.
Another common arrangement is a hierarchical ranking of lineages called conical clans or ramages. In these schemes there is a maximal lineage at the top of the pyramid which is closest to an apical ancestor, and a number of segments arranged in descending order in accordance with how many generations back they can trace their ancestry from that ancestor, with minimal segments the most distant. Kinship was also used in the formation of multi-tribal federations. When new links and alliances were forged through processes of tribal fusion, a common ancestry would often be "faked" or "invented."
Thus, the creation of corporate groups greatly accelerated the elaboration of material and symbolic culture far beyond that seen in band societies. It also accelerated the division of society into factions, which do not exist in band societies comprised solely of nuclear and extended families. Conflicts and rivalries between both corporate groups and villages were a common feature of many tribal societies.
Given the importance that genealogy played in tribal societies, it is certainly no coincidence that many of these societies engaged in ancestral veneneration—that is, the worship of dead ancestors. This form of worship supplanted the earlier animist belief systems of band societies which were based more around direct personal experience of a transcendent realm mediated by shamans.
With ancestor worship, the departed relative is deified and his spirit is assumed to intercede in the world of the living on behalf of his or her descendants. To this end, he or she is expected to receive continued ministrations from their living offspring. As anthropologist Edward Tylor described it, "The dead ancestor, now passed into a deity, goes on protecting his family and receiving from them suit and service as of old. The dead chief still watches over his own tribe, still holds his authority, by helping friends and harming enemies, still rewards the right and sharply punishes the wrong."
Just as with kinship terminology, ancestral veneration may have originally extended back three generations, with additional generations grafted into the worship over time, according to Henry Sumner Maine:
In the case before us the ancestors sought to be propitiated by sacrifices and prayers are ancestors actually remembered, or, at all events, capable of being remembered by the worshipper. Proximity in time is essential to the worship of which I am speaking.
There are signs that, according to the early ideas of many communities—communities, for example, so far removed from one another as the Hindus and the Irish—a man living as a member of a Joint Household or Family could at most expect to see at some time during life three generations above him and three generations below him. In accordance with this expectation, the ancestors worshipped are three: the father first, then the grandfather, and then the great-grandfather. The reverence paid to remoter ancestors, not personally remembered, may be believed to be a later off-growth of these ideas. [10]
Ancestral veneration is found in cultures all over the world, for example, throughout East Asia with it’s widespread tradition of filial piety. Ancestral veneration then, together with the existence of corporate kin groups, appears to have played a key role in allowing larger and larger societies to form gradually out of smaller tribal units.
In a tribal society, ideas, in the form of religious beliefs, have a huge impact on social organization. Belief in the reality of dead ancestors binds individuals together on a far larger scale than is possible in a family- or band-level society. The "community" is not only the present members of the lineage, clan, or tribe; it is the whole rope of descent from one's ancestors to ones unborn descendants. Even the most distantly related kin feel they have some connection and duties toward each other, a feeling that is reinforced by rituals that apply to the community as a whole. Individuals do not believe they have the power of choice to constitute this kind of social system; rather, their roles are defined for them by the surrounding society before they are even born.
Tribal societies are far more powerful militarily than band-level ones, since they can mobilize hundreds or thousands of kinsmen on a moment's notice. It is likely, then, that the first society that was able to knit together large kindreds through religious belief in ancestors would have had enormous advantages over its rivals, and would have stimulated imitation the moment this form of social organization was invented. Thus war did not just make the state, it made the tribe as well. [11]
The existence of groups larger than the extended family meant that tribal societies were much more complex than were band societies. Many anthropologists see the arrival of corporate groups and ranked lineages as the beginnings of class stratification and greater economic and social inequality. Eventually, in larger societies, kinship-based systems of ownership and resource use would be supplanted by residence and class-based systems of ownership, leading to hierarchical societies like chiefdoms, and later, kingdoms and states.
All of the above leads to the fundamental conclusion that virtually all societies in the world outside of band societies organized themselves tribally at some point. Yet, it’s also abundantly clear that most people today do not live in small tribal societies anymore. Obviously something important has happened since tribes replaced bands as the predominant form of human social organization thousands of years ago. This leads us to what I think is one of the the most important conclusions of the book, which is that societies do not freely merge.
...while bands of the same hunter-gatherer society could fuse, as could villages of a tribe, societies stayed firmly apart...
The only examples of mergers...[are]...a fugitive situation: coalescent societies come about when people are too few to subsist on their own...among the famous examples are the Seminoles and Creeks. Once combined, these refugee populations often took the name and much of the lifestyle of the dominant tribe in their mix, with few allowances for the social markers of everyone else. (282)
Despite the human capacity for generating foreign partnerships, full mergers of societies are...never an outcome of alliances...The Iroquois confederacy was crucial in fighting mutual ememies—originally other Indians, then Europeans—with the tribes tasked with defending different borders of their combined realm. However, the independence of its six tribes as never in doubt. Coalitions such as theirs could be a source of pride, yet that didn't diminish the importance of their original societies. (283)
After the growth of societies beyond the size of hunter-gatherers living in bands, starting with people settling down in tribes, our story accelerates, for the simple reason that the prerequisites for turning those tribes into civilizations are simpler than they may appear… (275)
If societies do not freely merge, then how on earth did we end up in the huge anonymous societies that most of us live in today? In a few select places, tribal societies scaled up and absorbed the societies around them, a process analogous to that of single cells evolving into multicellular organisms: “In this, the general evolution of society parallels over-all biological progress: what is at one stage the entire organism (the cell, the band) becomes only the part of the higher organism (simple metazoa, the tribe).” [12]
That's what we'll be talking about next time.
* Hence terms like "brother from another mother," and "sister from another mister."
** What Karl Marx would refer to as the means of production. He would describe these tribal social arrangments as classic examples of “primitive communism.” Note that "communism" does not imply that absolutely everything was owned collectively by everyone, as Robert Henry Lowie notes in Primitive Culture:
"It follows from the following that we cannot content ourselves with a blunt alternative: communism verus individualism. A people may be communisitic as regards one type of goods, yet recognize seperate ownership with respect to other forms of property. Further, the communistic principle may hold not for the entire political unit of however high or low an order but only within the confines of a much smaller or differently constituted class of individuals, in which case there will indeed be collectivism but not communism in the proper sense of the term. These points must be kept in mind when surveying successively the primitive law of immovable and movable property, of immaterial wealth and of inheritance." Primitive Culture, p. 210
In other words, communism does not want your toothbrush.
† Many Egyptologists see the human/animal hybrid gods of ancient Egypt as an indication that predynastic Egypt was comprised of totemic clans.
All citations in quotes from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett, Basic Books, New York, 2019.
[1] Marshall Sahlins; The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion.
[2] ibid.
[3] Robin Dunbar; Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, pp. 272-276
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] Timothy Earle and Allen W. Johnson; From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, p. 131
[7] Eric R. Wolf; Europe and the People Without History, p. 91
[8] Earle and Johnson; From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, pp. 132-133
[9] ibid.
[10] Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, pp. 28-29
[11] Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, pp. 51-53
[12] Marshall Sahlins; The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion.
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