Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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21. One might take the Pueblos as a baseline case of simple chiefdoms in the American Southwest before moving on to the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico as an example of early state formation. However, the relation between these two cultures is highly problematic: it is possible that the Anasazi, the ancestors of the Pueblos, had been hunter-gatherers who began to develop new social forms under the indirect influence of the culture of the Valley of Mexico, but the lack of information about intermediate forms means that it is only with difficulty that the Anasazi could be seen as analogous to an early stage of the civilization of the Valley of Mexico.
22. Firth, We the Tikopia, 409.
23. Raymond Firth, Rank and Religion in Tikopia: A Study in Polynesian Paganism and Conversion to Christianity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), 42. Firth goes on to add: “In a very real sense, then, his tapu was created by them as a symbol of their collective action; it represented in a kind of practical Durkheimianism the values of their assembly and their society.”
24. Ibid., 35.
25. Raymond Firth, History and Traditions of Tikopia (Wellington: Polynesian Society, 1961), 53.
26. Morton H. Fried, The Evolution ofPolitical Society: An Essay in Political A ntbropology (New York: Random House, 1967), 133, quoting from Raymond Firth, Primitive Polynesian Society (London: Routledge, 1939).
27. The classic treatment of the Big Man is Marshall Sahlins, “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963): 285-303. On how “secular” the Big Man is, see Tony Swain and Gary Trompf, The Religions of Oceania (London: Routledge, 1995), 142.
28. Firth, History and Traditions, 17.
29. Both tapu and mana have entered the vocabulary of comparative religion, though their application to non-Polynesian societies has been challenged. They are, nonetheless, central terms in all Polynesian societies and probably have even deeper roots. Kirch and Green have reconstructed the terms in Proto Oceanic, and tapu even in Proto Eastern Maylayo Polynesian as well. See Kirch and Green, Hawaiki, 239-240.
30. Firth, Rank and Religion, 46.
31. Ibid., 23.
32. Irving Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 354.
33. Firth, Rank and Religion, 25
34. Ibid., 29.
35. Ibid., 90-91.
36. Ibid., 111-112.
37. Ibid., 297.
38. Firth, History and Traditions, 122.
39. Ibid., 128-143. Who exactly the Nga Ravenga and the Nga Faea were is open to speculation. Human occupation of Tikopia goes back to about 900 BCE, well before the origin of Polynesian culture in the area of Samoa and Tonga in about 500 BCE. The Polynesian “outliers,” of which Tikopia is one, were settled by Polynesians from the east probably sometime in the first millennium CE. Thus the Nga Ravenga and the Nga Faea could have been pre-Polynesians or simply an earlier group of Polynesian settlers. Kirch has discovered through archaeology that Tikopia suffered a geological change due to tectonic uplift in the period just preceding the expulsions, a change that turned an ocean bay into a brackish lake, making the area of the ancestors of present Tikopia much less productive and creating a need for territory occupied by others. Finally, whether the departure of the Nga Faea was a suicide mission or an effort to find new land to colonize (as had happened frequently in Polynesian history) remains an open question. On all these issues, see Patrick Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 80, 125, 202.
40. Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society, xviii.
41. Ibid., 17.
42. And aggression may be more strongly linked to males. See de Waal, “Apes from Venus.”
43. For examples, see Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
44. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), 72. Irving Goldman brought this passage to my attention in Ancient Polynesian Society, 18.
45. Goldman describes Tikopia as an example of a “traditional status system” in his typology of status systems. Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society, 20-28. He describes Hawaii in its Early Period (CE 124-1100) as “traditional” (212).
46. Marshall Sahlins, StoneAge Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), 101.
47. Sahlins, in his essay “The Original Affluent Society,” chap. 1 of Stone Age Economics, describes the “underproduction” of the many hunter-gatherer societies, whose members appear satisfied with meeting immediate needs. Agriculturalists are necessarily deprived of this kind of affluence.
48. Ibid., 140.
49. Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy of Prehistory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 76-77. But Earle also indicates that the officials of complex chiefdoms in Hawaii did organize work to intensify irrigation agriculture and thus increase surplus that could be appropriated (78-79).
50. Lawrence H. Keeley, in War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), argues that war is coterminous with human society. Raymond C. Kelly, in Warless Societies and the Origin of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), takes issue with Keeley by defining war as I have done in the preceding paragraph.
51. Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society, 41.
52. “Despite the sizable population of North Island in late prehistory, the Maori never amalgamated into large polities, nor did they undergo a socio-political transformation from a simple chiefdom level of organization to a complex, hierarchical social formation, as seen in Hawaii or the Society Islands.” Patrick V. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 283.
53. Ibid., 205.
54. Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society, 86.
55. Kirch, Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 206; Kirch, On the Road, 255.
56. “Charisma,” in Weber’s sense, is one possible translation of mana.
57. Kirch, On the Road, 257. It would seem that a possible relation between religion and terror goes way back, though perhaps not, contrary to Rene Girard in his Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1977), all the way back.
58. Kirch quotes an earlier authority on late precontact Rapa Nui as saying, “The various communities scattered over the island became more and more like predatory bands, and much of the older, more ordered way of life gradually vanished” (Kirch, Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 277). Kirch himself adds that the Dutch explorer Roggeveen found on Easter Day, 1722, a “war-torn, debilitated society” (278). Mangaia and Rapa Nui are by far not the only societies that have malfunctioned or maladapted. For a general survey of such cases, see Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992). What makes Mangaia and Rapa Nui especially interesting is that their breakdown was due entirely to endogenous causes, not to any external pressure. Such cases do not negate the value of “functional” analysis. Indeed, if societies never malfunctioned, functionalism would be tautologous.
59. Kirch, On the Road, 290, 312, 351 n. 49.
60. Kirch, Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 98; Kirch, On the Road, 248.
61. Earle, How Chiefs, 86.
62. Matthew Spriggs suggests that there may have been Tahitian influence on Hawaiian development in the period when voyages between the two were reported in traditional accounts, by modern reckoning, between 1100 and 1400 CE: “In traditional histories this is the `migration period’ when two-way voyaging took place between Tahiti and Hawaii bringing new chiefs and new ideas, in particular a new religious system involving human sacrifice and ceremonies in walled temples from which the common people were excluded. There is a greater stress on distinctions of rank and attendant kapu separating chiefs and commoners. Sev
eral of the major luakini heiau (temples of human sacrifice) were said to have been constructed at this time.” See Spriggs, “The Hawaiian Transformation of Ancestral Polynesian Society: Conceptualizing Chiefly States,” in State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization, ed. John Gledhill et al. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 60. Archaeological evidence for such a connection is slight, and other scholars doubt the accuracy of the traditional account concerning Tahitian influence.
63. Earle, How Chiefs, 36, 45.
64. David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1951 [1898]), 57-58.
65. Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 164.
66. Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society, 218.
67. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 36.
68. Ibid., 15.
69. Ibid., 200-233.
70. Ibid., 177-178.
71. Valeri writes “king,” but I wish to reserve the discussion of the legitimacy of that terminology until later.
72. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 219.
73. Ibid., 206, 380 n. 10.
74. Ibid., 218-219.
75. Ibid., 211-213.
76. Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society, 206.
77. See Valeri’s detailed description in Kingship and Sacrifice, 234-339. It is worth noting that although the Makahiki Festival and the Work of the Gods in Tikopia are clearly vari ants of a general Polynesian first-fruits ceremonial, there is no equivalent in Tikopia to the luakini temple ritual.
78. See, for example, the dispute between the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins over whether the Hawaiians thought Captain Cook and their own chiefs were gods. The essential documents are Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mytbmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Sahlins, How `Natives” 7bink: About Captain Cook, forExample (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).
79. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 151.
80. Ibid., 140. Valeri adds, “He is, in sum, the point of connection between the social whole and the concept that justifies it” (142). Valeri’s debt to Durkheim and Mauss is obvious throughout his excellent book.
81. Ibid., 140, citing S. M. Kamakau.
82. A claim made by political leaders from time immemorial. Even in “egalitarian” America, George Washington is “the father of his country.”
83. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 151.
84. Ibid., 370 n. 36.
85. Ibid., 165.
86. Ibid., 277-278.
87. Ibid., 157.
88. This reminds one of the words attributed to Han Gaodi, the first emperor of the Han dynasty after the collapse of the quintessential upstart Qin dynasty, that “one can conquer an empire on horseback but one cannot rule an empire on horseback.”
89. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, xxiv.
90. Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 60-61.
91. The fact that Malo wavers between the terms “chief” and “king” suggests just the ambiguity that I will deal with below. However, in this case Kamehameha I was a king by any definition.
92. Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 58.
93. Ibid., 195.
94. Ibid., 190.
95. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 220.
96. Periods of disorder after the death of a ruler are not unknown in other societies. Those who lived through the three days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 will remember that, although social order did not collapse, there was a widely shared sense of psychic collapse.
97. Kirch and Green, Hawaiki, 246.
98. Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 114.
99. Ibid., 115. The biblical overtones of this passage might cause doubts as to its authenticity. One might remember that the early Hebrew prophets, nabi, lived in a society not entirely different from late precontact Hawaii. It is worth noting that kaula was the term used for “prophet” in the Hawaiian translation of the bible. Compare Jeremiah 1:9-10: “Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, `Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”’
100. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 139. Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 251-254, recounts a legend of a struggle to the death between a king and a woman prophet.
101. Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, 139.
102. Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State (New York: Knopf, 1985) includes an extensive analysis of this phenomenon. Sagan also discusses the extent to which the people identified with the extraordinary power of the ruler.
103. Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 57.
104. The power of life and death over its subjects or citizens, through capital punishment or mobilization for war, gives every state, however apparently secular, an element of the sacred. See my discussion of the religio-political problem in the introduction to Robert N. Bellah and Philip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), vii-xv.
105. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 148.
106. Kirch, Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 263. Italics in original.
107. Kirch, On the Road, 300. Eli Sagan in Dawn of Tyranny also argues that the break with kinship is the defining feature of what he calls advanced complex societies; in his view, Hawaii was one of those societies that had made that break. In 2010 a new book by Kirch was published, unfortunately too late to be taken into account in this chapter. We may only note here that not only does this book confirm Kirch’s belief that what he calls an archaic state and I have called an early state emerged in Hawaii before Western contact, but he dates the transition as beginning already in the late seventeenth century. See Patrick Vinton Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise ofArchaic States in Ancient Hawaii (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010).
108. Lawrence Krader, Formation of the State (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 28. Italics in original.
5. Archaic Religion
1. Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28.
2. The Indus Valley civilization flourished from approximately 2500 to 2000 BCE. It had well-built cities with good water systems, as well as some irrigation agriculture, but not much in the way of public buildings. With nothing that can be clearly described as temples or palaces, neither the religious nor the political system is at all clear. For a recent treatment, see Jane R. McIntosh, A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002).
3. Claessen and Skalnik speak of “inconspicuous processes” that slowly produce institutions that only in retrospect can be recognized as characteristic of the state. Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik, eds., The Early State (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), 620-621.
4. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 44-45.
5. Ibid., 46.
6. Ibid., 48.
7. Ibid., 79-87.
8. Ibid., 88-89.
9. Ibid., 92-119.
10. Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy of Prehistory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 177.
11. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 639, 684.
12. Hans J. Nissen suggests that around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE, climatic changes occurred in Mesopotamia involving a decrease in rainfall. Heavy rainfall earlier would have sent such intense flooding into the alluvial plain that agriculture would have been impossible, but more moderate rainfall allowed its fruitful cultivation. See Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 55.
13. Andrew Sherratt, “Plough and Pastoralism: Aspects of the Secondary Products Revolution,” in I
an Hodder, Glynn Isaac, and Norman Hammond, Pattern of the Past: Studies in Honour ofDavid Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 261-305.
14. Ibid., 287.
15. Ibid., 284.
16. Susan Pollack, Ancient Mesopotamia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5-6.
17. Nissen, Early History, 72.
18. Pollack, Ancient Mesopotamia, 118; A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977 [1964]), 95-109.
19. Thorkild Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” in Before Philosophy: The IntellectualAdventure of Ancient Man, ed. Henri Frankfort, Mrs. Henri Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1949 [1946]), 141-142. Oppenheim, in Ancient Mesopotamia, 111-114, discusses the evidence for the existence of a city “assembly,” consisting of local notables not directly connected to temple or palace.
20. On heterarchy, see Peter Bogucki, The Origins of Human Society (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 256-257.
21. Thorkild Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness: The History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 114.
22. Also spelled Hammurabi.
23. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, 98. The “awe-inspiring luminosity” of Assyrian kings is reminiscent of the “raging blazes” that were said to characterize the Hawaiian ali’i.
24. Amelie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East, c. 3000-330 BC (London: Routledge, 1995).
25. For a description of the major gods, see Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, 93-143 (if I had to recommend one book on ancient Mesopotamian religion, this would be it); and jean Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 [1998]), 44-58.
26. Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 138-139.
27. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, 12.
28. Can we hear an echo of the Work of the Gods in Tikopia, or of the Makahiki festival in Hawaii?
29. On the “service to the gods,” see Jean Bottero, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1987]), 1-2; on the “care and feeding of the gods,” see Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, 183-298.