In my previous post on the tribal form of society, I had to cut a few things for length and clarity. But I thought people might enjoy some of what was left out of that post before we move on.
Most of it concerned the fact that European societies were also once organized along tribal forms. When Europeans started digging through their own remote history in the nineteenth century, to their great surprise, they found copious evidence of tribal societies in their own distant past.
The early Greek and Roman peoples were organized into patrilineal kin groups which were called genos in Greek; and gens or gentes in Latin. Greeks were additionally organized into tribes, or phylai. These groups, in turn, came together in larger fraternities called phratries in Greek culture and curia in Roman. Many of these tribal structures survived and played a vestigial role in the organization of early Greek and Roman city-states.
Every phratry or cury had a chief, a curion, or phratriarch, whose principal function was to preside at the sacrifices. Perhaps his attributes were at first more extensive. The phratry had its assemblies and its tribunal, and could pass decrees. In it, as well as in the family, there were a god, a worship, a priesthood, a legal tribunal, and a government. It was a small society that was modeled exactly upon the family.
While most people associate the Greeks and Romans with the pantheons of gods and the colorful mythology surrounding them, there was an older religion centered on worship of deceased ancestors. This was uncovered by a French scholar named Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in his book The Ancient City, quoted above. De Coulanges read through the surviving Greek and Roman literature and found evidence of older religious practices which predated the worship of the more well-known Greco-Roman pantheon. These practices centered around patriarchal households, with each household having its own hearth and family burial plot associated with the land that belonged to that household. The eldest son functioned as the high priest (pater familias) of this religion. As de Coulanges noted:
A comparison of beliefs and laws shows that a primitive religion constituted the Greek and Roman family, established marriage and paternal authority, fixed the order of relationship, and consecrated the right of property, and the right of inheritance. This same religion, after having enlarged and extended the family, formed a still larger association, the city, and reigned in that as it had reigned in the family. From it came all the institutions, as well as all the private law, of the ancients. It was from this that the city received all its principles, its rules, its usages, and its magistracies.
Each household maintained a sacred fire that represented the family and was never supposed to be extinguished unless the family line itself was extinguished. The fire was worshiped as a deity that represented the health and well-being of the family—not just the living family, but also the family's dead ancestors stretching back over many generations.
De Coulanges speculated that the Greco-Roman gods that we are familiar with today began as deities that were worshiped by various groups of people distinct from familial associations and ancestral veneration. Many of these may have been notable or heroic individuals from times past—the Greeks had a well-established cult of hero worship. Eventually, these various deities coalesced into the standard pantheon of Greek and Roman gods we are familiar with.
He noted that every city in the classical world had it’s own patron deity, and the worship of this deity was the glue that held ancient cities together. Every city had a temple to its patron god which was the epicenter of civic life. The most notable one was Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, whose temple on the Acropolis featured a massive statue of Athena, long since vanished. The deity was worshipped in the same manner as the houshold gods, and the city itself was regarded as a houshold writ large with its own worship:
Thus the city was not an assemblage of individuals; it was a confederation of several groups, which were established before it, and which it permitted to remain. We see, in the Athenian orators, that every Athenian formed a portion of four distinct societies at the same time; he was a member of a family, of a phratry, of a tribe, andof a city. He did not enter at the same time and the same day into all these four, like a Frenchman, who at the moment of his birth belongs at once to a family, a commune, a department, and a country.
The phratry and the tribe are not administrative divisions. A man enters at different times into these four societies, and ascends, so to speak, from one to the other. First, the child is admitted into the family by the religious ceremony, which takes place six days after his birth. Some years later he enters the phratry by a new ceremony, which we have already described. Finally, at the age of sixteen or eighteen, he is presented for admission into the city. On that day, in the presence of an altar, and before the smoking flesh of a victim, he pronounces an oath, by which he binds himself, among other things, always to respect the religion of the city.
From that day he is initiated into the public worship, and becomes a citizen. If we observe this young Athenian rising, step by step, from worship to worship, we have a symbol of the degrees through which human association has passed. The course which this young man is constrained to follow is that which society first followed.
Greek city-state patron gods (Wikipedia)
In Rome, the supreme deity was Jupiter (the Greek Zeus), and his temple was the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There was also a temple dedicated to his consort Juno—the temple of Juno Moneta. It is from this temple that we get the word money. The temples of the ancient world was where the first coins were minted, and each city-state minted its own coins. Such examples underscored the deep and pervasive connection between money, law, and ancient religious practices. Money did not originate in markets, nor did it arise through numerous acts of barter. The connection between religion, credit, and money was noted by Alfred Mitchell-Innes in his landmark essay, What is Money?:
The relation between religion and finance is significant. It is in the temples of Babylonia that most if not all of the commercial documents have been found. The temple of Jerusalem was in part a financial or banking institution, so also was the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The fairs of Europe were held in front of the churches, and were called by the names of the Saints, on or around whose festival they were held. In Amsterdam the Bourse was established in front of or, in bad weather, in one of the churches.
They were a strange jumble, these old fairs, of finance and trading and religion and orgy, the latter often being inextricably mixed up with the church ceremonies to the no small scandal of devout priests, alarmed lest the wrath of the Saint should be visited on the community for the shocking desecration of his holy name.
There is little doubt to my mind that the religious festival and the settlement of debts were the origin of all fairs and that the commerce which was there carried on was a later development. If this is true, the connection between religion and the payment of debts is an additional indication if any were needed, of the extreme antiquity of credit.
https://www.community-exchange.org/docs/what%20is%20money.htm
As Europeans voyaged around the world during the Age of Exploration, they noted similar social forms everywhere they went. In India the British noted that the structure of the Hindu village, which was labelled the "Joint Undivided Family" by Henry Maine, was very similar to that recorded in their own medieval past, and was intertwined with religious laws and practices—Hindusim in this case. Similar extended household structures were also noted by European colonizers on the island of Java in modern-day Indonesia. Maine was one of the first to draw analogies between these social forms and those he had encountered through his reading of ancient law codes. In a passage from his book Ancient Law, he wrote (emphasis mine):
...It is just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its services and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged by conjecture. It is full, in all its provinces, of the clearest indications that society in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the Individual.
We must be prepared to find in ancient law all the consequences of this difference. It is so framed as to be adjusted to a system of small independent corporations. It is therefore scanty, because it is supplemented by the despotic commands of the heads of households. It is ceremonious, because the transactions to which it pays regard resemble international concerns much more than the quick play of intercourse between individuals. Above all it has a peculiarity of which the full importance cannot be shown at present.
It takes a view of life wholly unlike any which appears in developed jurisprudence. Corporations never die, and accordingly primitive law considers the entities with which it deals, i.e. the patriarchal or family groups, as perpetual and inextinguishable. This view is closely allied to the peculiar aspect under which, in very ancient times, moral attributes present themselves. The moral elevation and moral debasement of the individual appear to be confounded with, or postponed to, the merits and offences of the group to which the individual belongs…
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22910/22910-h/22910-h.htm
One ancient law code that managed to survive in Western Europe was the Brehon Laws of Ireland. The Brehon laws were the body of native Irish law which was generally operational in Gaelic areas until the completion of the English conquest of Ireland in the early 17th century. These laws were translated into English in 1852. They clearly showed that traditional Irish society was arranged in a tribal form centered around clans and chieftains. Many of laws pertained to the exchange of things like cattle and slaves between various clans. To some extent such laws illuminated social forms which may date back to the original Indo-European peoples who migrated into Europe with cattle, wagons, and horses from the Pontic Steppes around 5,000 B.C.E. and formed the basis of nearly all later European cultures and languages (as well as those of India).
Clan system in ancient Ireland (LibraryIreland)
In more remote regions of Western Europe such as Ireland and Scotland, tribal structures survived much longer, such as the Irish and Scottish septs and clans (fine) which were headed by chieftains. In ancient Germany patrilineal clans were known as sippe, while in Norse cultures they were called ætt. Meanwhile in eastern Europe, extended joint family households survived in many places well into the nineteenth century when these scholars were examining them, such as the Serbian zadruga and Russian obshchina.
How ancient Germanic tribes lived (DW)
All of this caused Europeans to conclude that clans, tribes, households, and joint land ownership had been the initial form of their own societies as well. In his book Primtive Property, the Belgian scholar Emile de Lavaleye did a deep dive into social forms surviving in Western Europe to conclude, like Maine, that all private property like land and houses was originally collective in nature, and somehow had become alienated from joint ownership at some time in the distant past. In chapter 8, he writes of the similarities between the social structures of preindustrial Western Europe and Indian villages:
Professor Sullivan, who has devoted his life to the study of the ancient Celtic laws, allows that in early times no one had a right of usufruct in the soil, except by consent of the clan, and that a fresh distribution was made every year. At the much more recent period, with which the Brehon Laws make us acquainted, the social organization of Ireland resembled that of India, and of modern Serbia.
The population was divided into clans or tribes (fine), the members of which claimed to be connected by descent from a common ancestor. At the head of the clan was a chief, whom Irish traditions call a king. When the clan was numerous, it was subdivided into groups, each united by closer ties of kinship, and also having a chief, called by Anglo-Irish jurists caput cognationis. These groups corresponded to the Roman gens, and the Greek genos; and to the cognationes hominum of Germany, amongst whom...the soil was redistributed every year.
The juristic and political unit in the social order was not, as at present, the isolated individual, but the family group called the sept. This was precisely similar to the Zadruga, the family community, which the Germans appropriately call Hauskomiminion. The sept also resembled the family groups, the societies of compani or Frarescheux, the "coteries " and "fraternities," which in the middle ages in France lived in one large building, cella, tilling the land in common and dividing its produce, living "ait même pot" and "au même chanteau."
The same social organization was found among the Scotch as among the Irish. Mr Skene, in his book, The Highlanders of Scotland, quotes the evidence of an English officer in 1730: "The Highlanders are divided into tribes or clans under leaders or chieftains, and every clan is subdivided into 'stocks' likewise subject to chieftains. These 'stocks' are again divided into branches of the same race, which contain fifty or sixty men related by common descent."
Modern India affords us, in its joint-family, the exact image of the Celtic sept of ancient Ireland. The joint family is a juristic person, which holds and acquires property and has a perpetual existence, like a society in mortmain. It presents a perfect type of the archaic mode of joint occupancy which I've meet with in all primitive agricultural societies. It consists of an association of all the persons who would have taken part in the funeral ceremonies of the common ancestor; and is the agnatic family of the Romans, comprising all those who would have been subject to the authority of the common ancestor, were he alive to exercise it.
Similar collective structures were also found throughout the Americas as well. The Iroquois of North America, as already mentioned, lived together in matrlineal clans. The Aztecs lived in descent groups called calpulli, (barrios) which were further aggregated into larger altepetl, or city states, headed by a tlatoani (headman, or chief). The South American peoples we know as the Inka were organized into ranked conical clans called ayllu. Similar conical clan structures, or ramages, were also found throughout Polynesia. The overwhelming evidence from around the world proved that Liberal theories of voluntary or contractual social formation promoted by people like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes were completely wrong. Societies predated writing, laws or governments, and—as studies of chimps and bonobos demonstrated— even humanity itself.
In recent years, attention has been paid to why tribal structures broke down to such a large degree in Western Europe. The general consensus is that the Catholic Church's prohibition on marriages between close kin succeeded in breaking apart clan and joint family structures. This, in turn, led to distinctive patterns of marriage and inheritance in Western Europe as opposed to eastern Europe and throughout much of the rest of the World. The demographer John Hajnal noted that there was an imaginary line running roughly from Trier in Italy to St. Petersburg in Russia which divided these practices, subsequently dubbed the Hajnal Line. Cultural practices surrounding marriage, family and inheritance west of this line were unique enough to be dubbed the West European Marriage Pattern.
More recently, the anthropologist Joseph Henrich published a book last year not only describing the origins of this division, but describing the social and cognitive differences that it established between Western European cultures—dubbed WIERD (Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich and Democratic)—and the rest of the world:
Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, “weird” culture became more receptive to strangers. Monasteries, universities, trading guilds, courts, stock markets, legislatures, coffee houses, newspapers—along with enterprise, trust and mobility—took root in the soil of “intergroup prosociality” created by the church’s edicts on marriage. Beyond Europe, non-“weird” people shared resources and a strong sense of local community but missed out on the forms of social dynamism and openness that supercharged Europe’s development.
Various subgroups within modern societies can be thought of as preserving something of the tribal character, such as Romani Gypsies, Irish Travelers, street gangs, and organized crime syndicates like the Russian, Italian, and Japanese mafias. By far the largest tribal society in the world today are the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan. By some estimates, their society has as many as 60 million members—rivaling or surpassing the size of many Western European nation-states such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal or Italy!
The universality and durability of the tribal form means that tribal structures tend to form spontaneously when societies break down. We've even added the word "tribal" to our lexicon to refer to any kind of inwardly-focused group with exclusive membership that exists in opposition to other groups. So-called "tribal" behavior is the scourge of modern-day politics and has engendered a lot of hand-wringing, but it can be seen as natural given our proclivities. What is more unnatural are the massive nation-states most of us live under today. To some extent, modern states exist only by short-circuiting our tribal nature—the tendency to favor friends and close relatives (kin) over strangers. This is only ever temporary, which is why states are precarious constructions prone to repeated breakdown and failure, as amply demonstrated by history. We may have evolved certain unique cognitive abilities in the distant past that allow us to organize ourselves somewhat along the lines of the social insects, but we're still primates at heart.
Next time, we'll be talking about chiefdoms, hopefully. I also wanted to set out a few basics about the stock market given recent events, but won't have time to complete it this week. Yet again, there is a blizzard outside and it is utterly miserable here, with probably months and months of brutal winter still to come :'‑(