The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus.
Human societies were markedly egalitarian during hunter-gatherer times, but bit-by-bit surrendered precious parts of their equality to new social organizations that emerged with the onset of agriculture and settled life. The authors’ extensive anthropologic and archeologic review documents this progressive loss of equality around the globe as human societies relentlessly evolved to larger and more complex organizations. At all levels, these groups had a cosmology and a social logic that provided myths of origin, links to ancestors, and sources of authority.
For millennia, hunter-gatherer societies were limited to the size of extended families. These groups enjoyed remarkable equality, mostly enforced by group pressure. No one amassed surpluses, owned land, or controlled community tools, like traps and nets. Food was shared during famines and divided according to rule after successful hunts. Gift-giving for alliances was reciprocal and symmetrical to avoid humiliation. Head men had no coercive authority and accepted no privileges. Today, the remnants of these groups are found only in the most inhospitable places, like the Kalahari Desert, Amazon rain forest, and frozen north, because they lacked the size to resist evolving larger groups.
Some foraging groups moved beyond extended families to lineages, subclans, and clans, often reckoning descent from real or imagined ancestors and incorporating support from music, dance, and ritual. Thus, by the late Ice Age, the first step had been taken toward “us versus them” mentality, increased group violence, intergroup competition, and greater social inequality. Within these groups and with the shift to agriculture, the consolidation of power began that would lead to “big men”, chiefs, kings, and emperors.
Initially, the drive of some men to have enhanced social status was accommodated by allowing “achievement based” leadership, which was limited, nonhereditary, and generally harmless. Eventually, some of these men increased their power by demonstrating greater “life force”, linkage of ancestry to the creation myth, and prowess as warriors. Next, they consolidated their control over all group resources and made their positions hereditary, with adjustment of social logic and cosmology, if necessary. Inevitably, these men looked to extend their power to neighboring societies. They began by raiding adjacent villages to get heads, slaves, and loot. Next they began conquering them to expand their territory. Finally they began many generations of perpetual warfare during the various stages of consolidation of ever larger territories to form chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires
This consolidation of power relationships simultaneously propagated downward within all social units. Rank order societies emerged as dominant individuals increasingly gained hereditary control over a group’s resources. Eventually, these societies progressed to a high level of unequal stratification that included aristocracy, religious leaders, warriors, merchants, peasants, and slaves. In even more extreme cases, these levels solidified into castes that did not permit movement from one level to another.
Eventually, consolidation of power at the top was so complete that the terror, cruelty, and arbitrary demands imposed by rulers knew no bounds. Often, the few subjects allowed to approach a ruler did so only after ritual purification and then prostrate with averted gaze to avoid punishment or even death at his whim. Shaka, ruler of the Zulus, imposed a year of mourning at the death of his mother during which no crops would be planted, no cows would be milked, and no married couples would engage in sex. He subsequently executed 7,000 of his own subjects for insufficient mourning.
For much of the book, findings from thousands of archeological sites throughout all continents and the Pacific Islands are analyzed together with modern anthropologic correlation. Initially, simple villages were organized for mutual protection, cooperative activity, and shared grain storage. These villages gradually evolved into much larger cities with defensive walls, large central ritual areas, large temples, large private storage areas controlled by elites, monuments glorifying rulers, royal tombs with many sacrificed companions, and huge palatial structures for rulers, their many associates, and hundreds of concubines.
The authors argue that the progression to inequality is not the result of genetically transmitted human nature, but rather the result of culturally transmitted and altered “social logic”. Initially, the transition to agriculture led to achievement-based societies that excelled at providing ambitious individuals with acceptable ways to increase their prestige without a hereditary component. Eventually, the rise of debt-slavery, weaponized gift giving to humiliate rivals, cooption of religious narrative and ritual, and demonstrated prowess by warriors overcame the resistance to hereditary rank-based rule and led to increasing inequality.
Finally, the authors humorously speculate about putting egalitarian hunter-gatherers in charge to remedy inequality. A certain degree of sexism, ageism, and ethnocentrism would remain. Nevertheless, many positive changes would follow. Harsh drug laws would be unlikely, given their use of psychoactive substances in their rituals. Abortion would be legal, since some of their societies even practiced infanticide when resources were scarce. Religious proselytizing would cease because other groups were believed to have their own cosmology for origins and religion. Flexibility in marriage would be tolerated because their societies had various arrangements depending upon circumstances, including same-sex marriage, polygamy, polyandry, and other combinations. With respect to inequality, sharing and achievement-based villagers would never allow CEOs to earn hundreds of times more than assembly-line workers and would insist on a safety net for the less fortunate.
