Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Pintupi experience the life cycle as a continuous progression toward autonomy and potency, a progression toward greater identification with the most encompassing dimensions of the moral order. Younger males consent to the authority of the older in expectation that there is value to be gained-both for them and for the entire society. To carry the Law is something they do for themselves, but something they do also for the continuation of life itself. Women, too, recognize the social value of male initiation and accede to its necessities. The power and authority of older men in this context are considered necessary to make everyone conform to the cosmic plan.

  What men display is the ability to “look after” people. Of course, at the same time, they define what it means for men to “look after” others: One does so by carrying and passing on the Law. Ultimately what older men give to younger is the ability to participate with other men as equals. Although this autonomy is not usually viewed as personal aggrandizement, the Law that they pass on as value still serves as the instrument of their power. Through it, men exert authority without accusation of being egotistical. They only mediate the Dreaming.”

  Because the younger generation, which is being cared for and to whom the Law is being passed, will become the older generation and in turn care for and pass on to a still younger generation, authority, except for that of the Dreaming itself, is temporary, is indeed the means by which dependent youngsters attain adult autonomy and responsibility. A similar pattern exists among many Aboriginal groups and is sometimes referred to as gerontocracy, the rule of the elders. Such authority can be abused, can turn into domination, when it is used to withhold potential marriage partners from young men, or takes the form of sadistic initiation practices, but according to Myers this is not the case among the Pintupi.1z

  Yet the disposition toward dominance is not missing among the Pintupi. Men who put themselves forward beyond the circumscribed limits of legitimate authority are a major cause of “trouble.” Rather than confront a potential upstart, the Pintupi prefer to leave the area where he is trying to assert himself, a common method for handling upstarts among hunter-gatherers, what Boehm refers to as shunning. Myers says, “asserting oneself too much is fraught with danger,” and cites the case of a man who was widely criticized for his presumption; when the man died suddenly during an initiation, it was believed that he had been sorcerized.13

  If legitimate hierarchy and the disposition toward dominance that it seeks to control are in evidence among the most egalitarian societies, where authority is temporary and minimal, but by no means absent, then it is not surprising that they will be found in more complex societies as well. Let me turn to another of the groups we considered in the last chapter, the Kalapalo, for an example of authority that is not circulating and temporary, but permanent insofar as it can be inherited, though in this case it hardly ruffles the waters of a still-pervasive egalitarianism.

  Ellen Basso speaks of “hereditary ritual officers known collectively as anetau (singular anetu) who manage, organize, and plan the ritual process.“14 During the sometimes lengthy preparation for rituals, the anetau extensively organize and coordinate the labor required to prepare the resources that will be used in the ritual. But, as in the case of the Pintupi, the authority of the anetau “represents community consensus and is motivated by community rather than personal goals.” Indeed, the anetu is supposed to personify the central Kalapalo ideal of ifutisu, as specified in the virtues of generosity and conciliation, virtues that operate to deny a desire to dominate.”

  In the village Basso studied, two anetau men, aspiring to leadership, divided the community into competing factions. Nonetheless, outside the ritual context the anetau play no role; economic and social life “being organized around households and networks of relatives.“16 Although a third to a half of villagers are of anetu descent, only certain individuals among them, such as the men mentioned above, ever play the role of ritual officer. Even so, all anetau have a degree of honor or respect, what is referred to as rank, in that their funerals are more elaborate than those of other Kalapalo, and become the occasion for some of the central rituals of the people. How such ranking ever got started in the first place-and there are ranked societies without states or even chiefdoms in many parts of the world-is not easy to explain. The anetau are not said to “own” rituals the way patrilineages in Australia own rituals, but they are indispensable to the organization of ritual life, which, in turn, tells the Kalapalo who they are. It is hard to believe that it is not the connection to ritual that sets apart the anetau from the rest of society.

  Although the increase in economic surplus does not determine the form that hierarchy and domination will take, it is true that increasing economic surplus from horticulture and agriculture (and even from hunting and gathering in cases like the Northwest Coast of North America where the resources, in this case fishing, were especially plentiful) does correlate with the growth of hierarchy and domination (we will consider some possible reasons for this correlation later). The Kalapalo, it will be remembered, have a modest amount of horticulture, along with hunting and gathering, and so more surplus than the Pintupi. But even though outsiders have sometimes referred to the anetau as “chiefs,” Basso says “they are not necessarily village leaders and are frequently without any political influence whatever,“17 and so cannot serve as an example of even simple chieftainship. We might turn to the Pueblo Indians, neighbors of the Navajo, the third group described in detail in Chapter 3, to find clearer instances of at least incipient chiefdoms, but the Pueblos are so diverse and their ethnography so enormous that it has seemed wiser to turn in an entirely different direction.”

  Polynesia is a kind of laboratory for the comparative study of chiefdoms. Ancestral Polynesian culture emerged some 2,500 years ago in the area of Samoa and Tonga, what is called Western Polynesia. Over the next 1,500 years Polynesians spread to Central Eastern Polynesia-the Society Islands (including Tahiti), the Marquesas, and other nearby archipelagos-as well as north to Hawaii, southeast to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), south to New Zealand, and west to what are called the Polynesian Outliers. Except for the Outliers, all the islands were uninhabited when the Polynesians arrived. In the Western Outliers, Polynesians replaced or merged with populations who had arrived in the earlier Lapita colonization, from which the Polynesians themselves had evolved.

  What makes Polynesia so helpful for present purposes is that Ancestral Polynesian Society has now been rather thoroughly reconstructed by Patrick Kirch and Roger Green.” Its social form was a simple chiefdom. All the complex chiefdoms in Polynesia developed endogenously from this beginning, having been subject to no outside influence before the arrival of Europeans. Hawaii, which we will consider as an early state, was particularly isolated and had had no communication even with other Polynesian groups for about 500 years before European discovery at the end of the eighteenth century. The emergence of complex chiefdoms is difficult to understand, but we can at least be sure that in Polynesia the process was entirely endogenous.

  Tikopia

  We can begin with the simple chiefdoms of the small island of Tikopia (three square miles), studied by the great twentieth-century ethnographer Raymond Firth.20 Though Tikopia is no fossil-it is a Western Outlier with a history of occupation going back some 3,000 years-it is an example of what is referred to as a conservative Polynesian society, exhibiting some of the features of Ancestral Polynesian Society, even though it is not by any means an unchanged continuation of it.“i

  Even though extended kinship is important in egalitarian band societies, the residential group is usually the decisive unit, as we have seen among the Pintupi. In rank societies, however, kinship becomes central, for it is lineages and clans that are ranked. Tikopia is a small, somewhat isolated island, southeast of the main Solomon Island group, and it had a population of 1,281 when Firth undertook a census in 1929.22 It was divided into four clans, each with several lineages, and although lineages tended to be localized, landholdings, whic
h belonged to lineages, could be anywhere on the island. Each clan had a chief and, although there was no paramount chief, there was a ranking of clans and their associated chiefs so that the Ariki Kafika, the chief of the highest-ranking clan, the Kafika, was said to represent “the whole land” of Tikopia, although he had no political authority in clans other than his own. The highest-ranking lineage within the clan bore the name of the clan, and the chief was chosen from this lineage. But there was another dimension of ranking in Tikopia, particularly striking in such a small-scale society, namely the distinction between chiefs, who were true aristocrats, and everyone else, who were commoners.

  Even though the chief had to come from the highest-ranked lineage in the clan, there was no automatic succession by lineal descent. The eldest son of the chief was the presumptive heir, but he, like everyone else in the clan except the chief, was a commoner. Nor was it certain he would ever become anything else, for another member of his lineage might be chosen instead. At least nominally, the chief was elected by the people. As the Ariki Tafua (chief of the Tafua clan) told Firth: “When a chief is elected, he is made tapu by the body of the people. While he is still living as a common man, he is only an executive [maru], but when he is taken as chief he has become tapu indeed. When a chief is going to be elected all the people gather together. Then the expression is uttered `He is made tapu by the body of the Tapu, the Polynesian word from which our word “taboo” comes, can in this case not too inaccurately be translated as “sacred.” The respect with which the chief, and the chief alone in Tikopia society, was treated suggests that he was indeed a sacred object: he was not to be touched by others; one bowed or kneeled in his presence; one never turned one’s back on him, and when leaving his dwelling one backed out the door. The chief remained aloof, visited by others but not visiting them, and certainly not eating with them. As Firth indicates, there was something kingly about the Tikopia chief-something redolent of supreme authority, even divinity-though we will see in what ways those implications must be How are we to account for this extraordinary status of a chief of only a few hundred individuals, so without parallel in egalitarian band societies? What were the practical implications of this status? In particular, what was the balance between legitimate authority and the power to dominate?

  Perhaps the first thing to be said is that the chiefs were also the high priests of Tikopia: there was no differentiation of sacred and secular power. As high priests they were the intermediaries between the major divinities and the people, and they also appointed subordinate priests, elders, in the other lineages of the clan who were responsible for mediation between their people and the lesser divinities tied to their own lineages. The authority of Tikopia chiefs derived primarily from their role as priests. As Firth puts it:

  The chief of Kafika was acknowledged to be the first among the chiefs of Tikopia in the traditional religious system, and in secular as well as in sacred contexts he was given pride of place. Primus inter pares, he regarded himself, and was regarded by his people, as having the prime responsibility for the prosperity and welfare of the land as a whole. Though in secular contexts the Ariki Kafika was conceded priority, it was through his special relation with powerful gods that he was believed to exercise his superior role in the social and economic as well as in the religious spheres.21

  The Tikopia chiefs, even the Ariki Kafika, could be said to lead but not to dominate. They were well off by Tikopia standards, but others might have more land. They worked their land or fished like everyone else, and Morton Fried wrote, quoting Firth, “‘Most of their food comes from their own exertions.’ By initiative and example a chief inspires and directs community production. He gives elaborate feasts, and this generosity `sets the seal upon his The chief appointed a few close relatives as executive officers (maru) with authority to break up fights, settle minor disputes, and so on, but if force was needed, he had to call on the men of his clan-he had no military force of his own-and the chief himself was supposed to refrain from violence. The chief, then, appears neither to have exploited his followers nor to have tyrannized over them, but to have “ruled” by example and generosity. His followers retained the ability to decide for themselves whether to do what he wanted.

  In all these regards the chief seems little different from the self-limiting upstarts called Big Men in small horticultural societies, particularly in Highland New Guinea. Big Men gain prestige through generosity, one of the few acceptable avenues for leadership in egalitarian societies. Through marriage alliances and loans to others that can be called in later, they accumulate vast quantities of yams and pigs, which are then distributed in great feasts, bringing honor to their giver. The Big Man exhausts himself in the accumulation of resources and has little chance of passing on his prestige to his offspring. What is significant in comparison to Tikopia chiefs is that the prestige of the Big Man is unrelated to his lineage, and not dependent on any religious function, though he may be abetted by men with spirit powers.27

  Not only was the Tikopia chief a priest, but his religious role indicates a significant shift in the understanding of the relation between humans and powerful beings from anything we saw in Chapter 3. For the first time, and not entirely clearly, one can detect along with the numerous powerful beings still present in the land, beings that can tentatively be called gods. Although the Tikopia had nothing like history in our sense, they did have a conception of several major time periods. First was the age of the gods, when most of the major deities appeared, deities many of whom were still central for worship as long as the traditional religion survived. These gods had homes in the sky, though they were interested in the land of Tikopia, even fought each other for domination of it. Eventually the gods gave birth to men who founded the major lineages. The next period was one in which gods and men both walked the earth and interacted with each other face to face. Finally the gods retreated to their spirit abodes, from which they could still intervene in human life (sending a good harvest or a hurricane), and from which they also could be summoned by the performance of the proper ritual and the utterance of the proper name in order to receive human requests.28 This sequence is somewhat similar to that of the Kalapalo, for whom “in the beginning” there were the powerful beings, then the Dawn People who could interact directly with powerful beings, and then ordinary people whose interaction with powerful beings was mainly through ritual. But whereas the Kalapalo imagined the Dawn Time as only a few generations ago, the Tikopia have a much more extensive sense of quasi-historical time. Because lineage is so important to them, and priority of ancestry is related to the status of the lineage, they have accounts of as many as ten generations of ordinary human succession, which Firth estimates as the equivalent of at least 250 years. The mythical time before that is not intelligible in terms of successive generations. The Tikopia, like the groups described in Chapter 3, is an entirely oral culturethere is no written record of the stories of gods or men that has any definitive authority. Therefore it is not surprising that there are many names for the same god and many versions of the same myth, depending on who is speaing, in particular from the point of view of which lineage or clan. None of this represents anything different from what we have seen before.

  What is different in the Tikopia case, and what marks, however incipiently, a transition to archaic religion, is that the central rituals are no longer enacted collectively; the people no longer become one with the powerful beings through music and dance. Although the whole community is involved in the ritual process, the chief alone performs the ritual, acting as an intercessor between the people and the gods. And the praise, thanksgiving, and requests for blessings offered by the chief acting as priest are what allow us to speak of these rituals as worship and the objects of these rituals as gods. The central ritual occurs in an open-air temple with the priest presiding. Food offerings, which women and children have helped prepare, have been baked in a large oven. Kava, a mildly narcotic drink, is the most important offeringindeed, it gives its name
to the rituals, each chief having his own “Kava”and it requires an elaborate preparation for which even children are enlisted. The food offerings are distributed to the people after the ritual, but the kava, which was a ritual drink among a number of Polynesian societies, is not drunk but entirely poured out as a libation to the god or gods to whom the ritual is oriented. Particularly in connection with the major ritual cycles called the Work of the Gods, performed twice yearly, there is general feasting, singing, and dancing, which does not take place in the temple. Dance was still very important in Tikopia, as everywhere in Polynesia-the gods were depicted as particularly enjoying the dance-but dance was not the center of the ritual.

  Although, as I have said, there is general participation before and after the central ritual, the ritual itself is performed by the chief alone with a few senior men in attendance. It consists of the priest offering the food and the kava to the god or gods while reciting the sacred litany requesting blessings. We have spoken of the Tikopia ariki as tapu-sacred-but the source of his sacredness is his manu (Proto Polynesian mana).29 Firth explains the connection between manu and chiefly ritual as follows: “The quality of manu [mana] was one which could be manifest in some circumstances by ordinary men, but above all it was the property of chiefs. `No common man is manu in his lips.’ The prosperity of fruiting breadfruit and coconut, health for the people, etc., was conceived to arise from the `lips’ of the chief, from his recital of the ritual formula … The origin of manu lay with the spirits, the gods and ancestors.“30 Much of what the chief says is inaudible even to the few in attendance, for the words, and especially the names of the gods, are secret.