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

by Robert N. Bellah

  It would be easy to argue that other Polynesian societies are more hierarchical than Tikopia because of the presence of a “large technical apparatus,” in this case elaborate systems of irrigation, found in many of the larger islands and in Hawaii in particular. But Timothy Earle and others have shown that even the most elaborate Polynesian irrigation systems required only local leadership, no more oppressive than that of Tikopia chiefs; they reject the “hydraulic theory” of Karl Wittfogel, the argument that irrigation systems lie at the origin of the state (or of complex

  What about “warfare,” that other “collective activity” that Sahlins linked to the need to transcend the domestic mode of production? Warfare and chiefdoms are linked for reasons that are becoming increasingly clear. Al though there is no peaceable past to hark back to-hunter-gatherers often have homicide rates higher than our inner cities-war does seem to be correlated with economic intensification and to emerge in relatively recent prehistoric times. Much depends on what we mean by war: homicide, revenge, even occasional raiding are not rare among hunter-gatherers. But organized warfare oriented to territorial conquest does seem to appear only where rich economic resources are locally concentrated and other options are less appealing. And organized warfare is usually associated with the appearance of chiefdoms.50

  Earle’s comparison of the archaeology of three cases where chiefdoms emerged shows that the earliest levels of settlement in the Thy region of Denmark, the Mantaro Valley of Peru, and Hawaii lacked both warfare and chiefdoms: early settlers could just move on if they found the good land taken. But all three groups were agriculturalists-the Danish group was also pastoralist-and when there was no more good land to be had, then fighting over what there was began. Undoubtedly organized warfare requires leadership, so it is not surprising that chiefdoms emerged in all three cases. But in only one case, Hawaii, did there emerge a paramount chiefdom approaching the level of an early state. In the Peruvian highlands the Mantaro small chiefdoms fought each other for centuries, some rising, some falling, but none ever amounting to much until the Inka conquest.

  To take a Polynesian example, the Maori of the North Island of New Zealand were divided into dozens of small chiefdoms constantly at war with each other, but no larger entity emerged. The Maori chiefs were richer and more powerful than Tikopia chiefs, but remained united by bonds of kinship with their followers. Goldman quotes Firth as saying of the Maori chief, “His wealth was utilized for his own aggrandizement and influence, but in so doing it contributed greatly to the material benefit of his people.“51 Goldman places the Maori together with Tikopia as “traditional” Polynesian societies. Although the North Island of New Zealand was larger than any other Polynesian Island, and reasonably productive economically (most of the South Island was too cold for the Polynesian subtropical agricultural array, and the Maori there became thinly settled hunter-gatherers), the fusion of religious and secular aspects of chieftainship and the unity of chiefs and people kept them closer to Ancestral Polynesian Society than in many other cases. Warfare, though endemic, did not create political entities larger than simple chiefdoms and did not fundamentally alter the traditional Polynesian pattern.52

  Even where warfare had more dramatic social consequences, it did not inevitably lead to large-scale social formations. For Kirch, “The case of Mangaia [one of the Southern Cook Islands] is instructive, for though a relatively small high island, it is a sort of microcosm for a Polynesian society in which politics, as well as economics and religion, had come to be thoroughly bound up with warfare.“53 In the case of Tikopia we have heard stories of a time when toa, warriors, threatened to overturn the political order. In Mangaia this is exactly what happened. With a population never more than about 3,000, early Mangaia was probably divided into several small chiefdoms, in which chiefs combined religious and secular authority, as in Tikopia or New Zealand. But at some point the chiefs were challenged by warriors, reduced to purely priestly functions, and replaced by a new kind of chief who was in effect a “military dictator.“54 The prize was the small area, 2 percent of the island, that could be irrigated. This land was redistributed as spoils of victory, its previous occupants being deprived of any hereditary claim to We have noted that mane, traditionally inherited in chiefly lineages, could also be manifested in others. Success in war was such a manifestation of mane, and could produce, as it did in Mangaia, a “secular” chief, a successful upstart who nonetheless had a thin veil of religious legitimacy. Lacking, however, what Weber called “hereditary charisma,“56 there was no form of routine succession-every new chief came to office only through military victory.

  This political revolution was mirrored by a religious revolution. The god Rongo, who elsewhere in Eastern Polynesia was a peaceable god of agriculture, became a god of war and the high god of the island. Rongo required human sacrifice at the accession of each new military ruler. According to Kirch, the archaeological record suggests that cannibalism was common in late prehistory. He sums up the situation by saying, “Late precontact Mangaian society became, to a pervasive degree, a society based on terror.“57 The small size and population of Mangaia prevented the emergence of a complex stratified society, but it is an example of some of the possible though not inevitable consequences of militarization.

  Scholars such as Kirch and Earle who have intensively studied chiefdoms, simple and complex, agree that their emergence was neither inevitable nor due to a single causal mechanism. There are, however, necessary but not sufficient conditions: an economy whose productive intensification beyond the household level required a significant degree of leadership; occupation of available land so that there was no open frontier to which the dissatisfied could move; highly productive land the use of which it was worth fighting over; and a degree of religious legitimation for economic-political-military leadership so that warfare did not threaten the continued existence of society. In New Zealand low-level endemic warfare seems to have been manageable, but in Mangaia, certainly in recent centuries in Rapa Nui (Easter Island),58 and perhaps in the Marquesas as well, the intensity of conflict threatened the very viability of society. Society is a fragile achievement: societies, like individuals, are vulnerable. No historically known society has lasted forever; we would be wise to remember than no society existing today is likely to be an exception.

  Hawaii

  Though one of the remotest parts of Polynesia, Hawaii was the richest, and, next to New Zealand, the largest of the island groups. Size and density of population are among the conditions for the development of complexity, necessary but not sufficient. Kirch estimates that at contact the population of Hawaii was at least 250,000 and perhaps considerably higher.59 The next largest Polynesian population was New Zealand, estimated at 115,000. However, the population of the “maximal political unit” in New Zealand was only 3,500, whereas the Hawaiian paramount chief, Kalaniopu’u, when he met Captain Cook at Keakakekua Bay in February of 1779, headed a chiefdom of at least 60,000 and possibly as many at 150,000 persons.60 Thus the large population of New Zealand did not lead automatically to large political units with complex chiefdoms, though all the complex chiefdoms in Polynesia were in areas of large and dense populations: besides Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti.

  Of course, the population of Hawaii did not start out large. At settlement, sometime in the early centuries CE, its population was probably a few hundred at most and maybe as small as 50. For centuries, as the land was being gradually occupied and developed, simple chiefdoms similar to the Ancestral Polynesian model prevailed. From 1100 to 1500, however, population and agricultural intensification both rapidly increased, and fiercely competitive regional chiefdoms appeared.61 Small, local temples, devoted to agricultural deities, and similar to what we have seen in Tikopia, are found almost from the beginning, but it is only after about 1100 that archaeologists date the building of large regional temples, devoted, if we can use ethnographic analogies, to the god of war, and indicative of the existence of complex chiefdoms.62

&
nbsp; The emergence of the particular Hawaiian system of class stratification most likely correlated with the development of warlike complex chiefdoms. The Hawaiian term ali’i is cognate with Proto Polynesian ariki, but, in Hawaii, even though it was still the term for chief, even paramount chief, it also applied to chiefly lineages in general, so it came to mean something like nobility as well. Unlike “conservative” societies like Tikopia and New Zealand, this chiefly nobility denied any genealogical linkage to the common people. One probable source of this split can be extrapolated from historical times: local chiefs had no genealogical relation to their locality; they were appointed by victorious paramount chiefs in return for their service in war. Thus the tie between the local community and its leader was broken. This break was reinforced by the prohibition (kapu, Hawaiian cognate for tapu]) of commoners keeping lineages going back before their grandfather’s generation.63 The loss of lineage and of lineal connection with the local chief had quite practical consequences: it entailed the loss of any right to the land. The new conquering chief might keep the existing farmers on as long as he could extract sufficient surplus from them, but the farmer served at the will of the chief or his local agent, the konohiki. He could lose his land or his life at the whim of either.14 Below the commoners was an outcast class, the kauwa, composed mainly of war captives and transgressors of kapu, from whom human sacrifices were taken. To commoners the kauwa were polluted and to be avoided at all cost, but not to the ali’i. The kauwa were beyond kapu because of transgression; the ali’i because of divinity; and thus they could enjoy a familiarity that neither could have with commoners.61

  The sanctity of the ali’i was not based on lineage as such, but on divine descent. As Goldman puts it: “[Sanctity] was specifically a quality of the gods and, in graded proportion, of their human descendents. Deference was thus to the gods and to the divine-descended. The offspring of high rank sibling marriages acquired the highest kapu because they were in fact gods. Like the gods they were said to be fire, heat, raging blazes. In the hierarchy of sanctity, gods and their human descendants were included in a single order.” Although the distance between ali’i and commoners was (almost) absolute, there were a number of grades within the large ali’i class. Some women of the highest level “had so much of rank that they dared not rear children for fear their power would either cripple the new-born infant or kill it. Such women gave their children away to relatives for rearing.“66

  The kapu surrounding the paramount chiefs and others of the highest rank was extreme compared to the tapu of the Tikopia ariki. The paramount chief was, for all practical purposes, supposed to be invisible: he did not leave his dwelling except at night when he would not be seen. He was even supposed to remain immobile, exercising his mana by his mere existence, not by any action. We will see that the chief could on occasion appear and even act with explosive energy, but the underlying sense of his extreme sanctity is expressed by these beliefs in his immaterial mana.

  The paramount chief was concerned with agriculture and played an important role, as we will see, in agricultural ritual, but he was far removed from the world of daily work. He was surrounded by what can only be called a court, consisting of relatives (consanguineal and affinal), officials, retainers, and a fairly extensive bodyguard. Just to supply the needs of his court the chief had to levy exactions on the commoners in his territory, but he also levied corvee labor for the construction of irrigation systems for taro and of fishponds in sheltered areas along the shore, as well as for the building of major temples. Although military leadership came from the ali’i class, commoners could be enlisted in wars. It was in the great rituals, which themselves required the mobilization of extensive resources, that the paramount chief’s sanctity and power were most publicly expressed.

  Before briefly describing the major rituals I must say a word about the gods to whom they were addressed. Traditional Hawaiian “theology” was much more developed than the beliefs we have seen in Tikopia. As Valerio Valeri says, “the highly systematic nature of the Hawaiian pantheon should not be surprising given the existence of a powerful class of priests, that is, of professional intellectuals.“67 (In Tikopia the chief passed on his ritual knowledge to his son, and it was vulnerable to loss due to such things as untimely death of the father, poor memory of the son, and so on.) The priests, who were themselves of ali’i rank, though not of the highest, were among the retinue of the court. Their existence did not mean that the chiefs were “secular” as in Mangaia. The chiefs continued to officiate at the most important ceremonies, indeed were essential for their efficacy, but they were assisted and even instructed by the professional priests. The role of the priests in developing a systematic view of the pantheon also did not replace the role of ritual leaders among the commoners who continued to have their own local temples, beliefs, and rituals, not necessarily correlated with the official ones.

  The four major Hawaiian gods were Ku, Lono, Kane, and Kanaloa, ranked in that order, at least on the island of Hawaii (Kane appears to have been the highest god in Kaua’i). I will discuss only Ku and Lono, the foci of the two most important ritual cycles. Each of the major gods presided over broad sectors of nature and of human activity. Ku was the god of war, fishing (a dangerous activity), and sorcery, whereas Lono was the god of agriculture, fertility, birth, and medicine.68 The opposition between Ku and Lono comes out clearly in the contrast between their ritual cycles.

  The Makahiki or New Year’s festival is devoted to the god Lono.69 According to Valeri, “Lono is preeminently the god of growth, of horticulture, of rain (he is associated with the clouds) and presides over the life of the people in general. As such he is the nourishing god. He is offered the first fruits of the land, particularly taro, which he helps to produce.” The gourd is one of Lono’s bodies and, according to Valeri, is “the one that perhaps better than all others condenses the different manifestations of this god. In fact, the fruit of the gourd evokes the roundness of that which is developed, full, or pregnant, as well as the form of rain-bearing clouds.” A gourd containing kava is placed around the neck of Lono’s image, and “the two mainstays of life, poi (taro puree) and water, are ordinarily kept in gourds.“70 Although Lone, is male, the references to roundness, pregnancy and fertility strongly suggest a feminine aspect. The major male gods have female consorts, but the consorts are not the objects of significant rituals.

  The Makahiki festival begins the Hawaiian year and lasts for four months. At the end of the old year the temples of Ku are closed and war and all forms of killing (including human sacrifice) are forbidden for the four months of the festival. There are moments in the Makahiki cycle that have a strong quality of Carnival-like status reversal, or, if not reversal, status leveling. As Valeri says, “the enthronement of Lonomakua [the image of Lono at the center of the festival], who is engendered by feasting, includes the dethronement of the [paramount chief]7’ and his gods, who are engendered by violent sacrifice.” The paramount chief and those closest to him remain secluded in their houses while Lonomakua A high point of the festival is the ritual bathing (hi’uwai). After an evening of feasting and kava drinking, nobles and commoners alike go to bathe in the ocean. This is the only time when the commoners see the most sacred ali’i, who, during the rest of the year, remain invisible. All the kapu that separate nobles and commoners are suspended, as the bathing becomes an orgy in which sexual relations between persons of different status are

  During the four days and nights that follow the hi’uwai rite, it is forbidden to work; the time is given over to feasting, mockery, obscene and satirical singing, and, above all, to dancing, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, participated. Laughter overcomes kapu, and sexual advances during the dancing cannot be refused. Valeri writes that “these marvelously coordinated dances” realize “a perfect fellowship” that reconstitutes society itself. All of this takes place in an atmosphere of “hierarchical undifferentiation.“74 It is as though, for a while at least, the old egalitarianism reappeared
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  Not all was egalitarian during the Makahiki season, nor was the paramount chief absent from some of the most important events. The chief escorted the Lonomakua, or impersonated the god himself, in a circumambulation of the island, collecting first fruits offerings from each district as he entered it. Most of the offerings went into the chiefly treasury or were distributed to his retainers, but at some moments the commoners were fed, a remnant of the old “redistribution.”

  The kali’i rite occurred toward the end of the Makahiki cycle. After bathing in the ocean for the first time in four days, the paramount chief and his men go by canoe to meet the god. When the chief lands he is met by Lone, priests who menace him with spears. Several spears, which he evades, are thrown at him and a mock battle ensues. The party of the chief “wins” and he subsequently escorts Lonomakua back into his temple. A little later, a tribute canoe filled with offerings, also called Lono’s canoe, is set adrift and Lono is said to return to Kahiki, the land of the gods, from which he came.75 The Makahiki festival is over and work and hierarchy are once more in control.

  The remaining eight months of the year belonged to Ku, whose most important ritual was the ritual of the luakini temple. As opposed to the public bathing, dancing and joking of the Makahiki festival, the solemn, even terrifying, luakini temple ritual took place within the precincts of the temple it self, dedicated to the war god Ku. Unlike most Polynesian temples, the major Hawaiian temple compounds were walled, so that no one besides the officiants could see what was going on, though we may be sure everyone knew what was going