Hierarchy in the Forest

On their list of serious moral transgressions, hunter-gatherers regularly proscribe the enactment of behavior that is politically overbearing. They are aiming at upstarts who threaten the autonomy of other group members, and upstartism takes various forms. An upstart may act the bully simply because he is disposed to dominate others, or he may become selfishly greedy when it is time to share meat, or he may want to make off with another man’s wife by threat or use of force. He (or sometimes she) may also be a respected leader who suddenly begins to issue direct orders, or a shaman who selfishly uses supernatural connections to manipulate and exploit others for material or sexual gain—or maliciously to cause them serious damage. An upstart may simply take on airs of superiority, or may aggressively put others down and thereby violate the group’s idea of how its main political actors should be treating one another. An upstart can also be a recidivist murderer or a homicidal psychotic. In any of these instances the upstart violates a set of values in which people believe deeply.

These values constitute what anthropologists call an egalitarian ethos (Cashdan 1980; see also Gardner 1991), a set of focal values that guide hunter-gatherers when they act on behalf of the band to keep its likely political deviants from transgressing unduly. Bands are moral communities that agree on their values and, as a latent but potent political coalition, are always poised to manipulate or suppress individual deviants.

Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, “I have killed a big one in the bush!” He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, “What did you see today?” He replies quietly, “Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all … maybe just a tiny one.” Then I smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big.

A proud hunter’s heavy use of denial and euphemism demonstrates the degree to which the group is able to intimidate its more prominent achievers. And even after his show of modesty, other band members preemptively take pains to put down the hunter. When they go to carry in the kill they express their “disappointment” boisterously.

You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here to make us cart home your pile of bones? Oh, if I had known it was this thin I wouldn’t have come. People, to think I gave up a nice day in the shade for this. At home we may be hungry but at least we have nice cool water to drink.

The actual feelings of the critics, who simultaneously are joking and deadly serious, is revealed in the words of a culture member:

When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.

The speaker is a famous healer and, obviously, an eloquent indigenous political philosopher. He is a student of human nature as well, and an astute one. He seems to be saying that legitimate male accomplishments may lead to inflated self-opinion and tendencies to dominate, and that with these proclivities men are likely to engage in homicide. Let us take these principles as a working hypothesis for any group of humans whose males are hunters.

As with other forager groups (see Kelly 1995), hunting prowess brings great respect among the !Kung because large-game meat is shared by all households within the band. As tabulated by Lee (1976:244), there is great variability among men as to who is responsible for the kills. They use two principal mechanisms to keep the best hunters from dominating the politics of the camp and monopolizing the women. We have seen that they preemptively cut down those who might become arrogantly boastful. They also share all large-game meat, helping those who are incapacitated or down on their luck, and these customs are enhanced by some very practical cultural rules.

Credit for the kill goes to the owner of the first arrow to hit the game. This man (who may not even have been present) has to distribute the meat formally to all household heads in the band—a task associated with not only prestige, but tension. Because the !Kung trade arrows often (Wiessner 1996), the responsibility of owning the meat while it is distributed is randomized, thereby preventing the more successful hunters from presiding over their own accomplishments. In effect, it is a way of removing the temptation to dominate. The fact that the best hunters speak so modestly, and frequently swap arrows to avoid envy, is a monument to the efficacy of ridicule as an instrument of social control. But as we shall see, if they are faced with serious upstartism people like the !Kung will go far beyond ridicule.

Lee’s is one of the richest descriptions we have of how hunter-gatherers preemptively put down potential upstarts in their midst. Such behavior is not reported to be regularly directed at women, who forage for plant foods that are often just for family use and capture only small animals that normally are not shared with the entire band. With less prestige attached to their daily work, the women are not in danger of trying to turn proficiency at food production into political power. The same applies to men when they gather plants or capture rodents.

Sharing of meat is by no means solely a political or social act. Kelly (1995) has discussed the widespread practice of sharing large-game meat as a means of reducing variation of protein intake at the family level, and it appears that even the better hunters’ intakes might be sporadic without this practice. Precisely because this actuarially sophisticated system of sharing could lead certain men to feel superior to others, a variety of practices and customs has been created to “cool their hearts,” in the words of the !Kung. It is worth noting that hunter-gatherers on other continents have invented similar practices to randomize the ownership of large-game kills (Wiessner 1996), surely from similar motives. A very successful hunter potentially poses a political danger to the band, and the band takes steps to reduce such problems even as cooperative sharing is facilitated.

In surveying a substantial portion of world ethnography in search of reliable reports of social control directed at potential or active political upstarts, I found extreme variability in the quality of these descriptions. Sometimes the ethnographer merely sums up a pattern of behavior or cites a single instance as an example. Truly rich descriptions like those of Lee are rare; in most instances the details are sparse—as when it is simply reported that Netsilik Eskimos once executed a shaman who began to dominate them (Balikci 1970).

To prepare the reader for my survey, I begin with two unusually detailed accounts in which the anthropologists themselves run afoul of egalitarian moral communities by inadvertently behaving as pushy political deviants. In the first case, I was the anthropologist; my own field notes and memory provide details about my ethnographically suicidal deviance and the response it engendered. The second case utilizes the painfully autobiographical ethnography of the anthropologist Jean Briggs (1970), who lived as an adoptive daughter with one of the last truly nomadic Eskimo bands in central Canada. To a significant extent she was being treated as a member of an Utku band at the time she transgressed, and her account of being “morally aggressed,” Utku style, is unique and vivid.

Anthropologist as Minor Upstart

In 1961, early in my graduate career, I spent a summer bouncing in a pickup truck over rutted roads and arroyos in New Mexico and Arizona. I was conducting fieldwork on Navajo beliefs, with the help of an able interpreter who spoke fluent English as well as his native Navajo. As part of a large research project, I was receiving my introduction to the study of nonliterate society, and the society in question was highly egalitarian. My mission, for three short months, was to interview traditional medicine men and obtain their views on the etiology of mental illness. A particular interest was in “moth craziness,” which was believed to be associated with incest.

Helping me to interview medicine men on these subjects was Howard McKinley, Jr., a remarkable young man nineteen years of age. Junior McKinley was the son of a member of the Navajo Tribal Council. He was unusually well educated in the formal sense, having attended a prep school on the East Coast. He also had spent considerable time as a child with his maternal grandmother at her homestead, herding sheep like a traditional Navajo.

Working closely together, Junior and I sought to interview medicine men in the Lukachukai and Fort Defiance areas, and whenever possible we worked through his maternal relatives, one of whom was his mother’s mother, Lillian Benally, a hand trembler or folk diagnostician who had some limited knowledge about mental illness. With a trust seldom encountered on that reservation (because of my close association with Junior), I was admitted quite abruptly into certain aspects of Navajo life.

I knew the Navajos had little reason to trust me. My culture had defeated theirs militarily, subjected them to privation, taken away their best land, and in 1878 had forbidden them their usual way of life, which was foraging and raiding as aggressive, band-dwelling nomads whose victims included the Hopi. Furthermore, we Anglos subsequently invaded their reservation as missionaries intent on undermining or destroying the Navajo religion.

Today the Navajos are peaceful pastoralists who customarily move around with their sheep, but who also grow gardens near the permanent homesteads that serve as their base. Even though the core of their subsistence has changed from foraging to chiefly pastoralism, they continue to live in small, locally autonomous groups about the size of typical hunter-gatherer bands, and they continue to be politically egalitarian: their leaders keep a low political profile, and in general aggressiveness is not condoned.

My behavior in the field was steered by perhaps the ultimate cultural coach. The younger McKinley was not only intelligent, he was shrewd about people. (He aspired to be a writer.) Junior made it clear to me, up front, that rural Navajos expected white people who sought them out on their own turf to be either missionaries or spies. Because we were approaching back-country traditionalist informants without advance notice, I was advised to keep a low profile and let him manage the show. At the end of several weeks Junior paid me a high compliment: his people were reacting favorably to my presence.

Whenever Junior took me to meet with a potential informant, I tried to behave as he did. You never got down to business in a hurry; rather, you were likely to squat on your heels for twenty minutes or half an hour while a few pleasantries were exchanged. The interactions were taking place in the Navajo language, of course, for many of the older people in the reservation outback spoke little or no English at that time. I seldom took part in these preliminary interactions, so whatever I was doing successfully via body language was largely unconscious on my part. I was emulating Junior’s friendly reticence and easygoing postures as best I could, and I learned to squat endlessly on my heels—a skill for which I had little use in my own culture.

Junior McKinley’s “Uncle Joe” was a respected traditional medicine man who seemed prepared to share some of his lore with us that summer, crucial lore that Junior thought might open an avenue of information inaccessible through other medicine men. In Junior’s opinion, mental illness seemed likely to be involved with witchcraft, and that would automatically present a problem. To say that Navajos do not readily speak about witchcraft is a profound understatement, for to have any knowledge of this dangerous subject suggests that you may be a witch. As in the past (see Kluckhohn 1944), the community’s inclination is still to execute such people. Seeking interviews about Navajo traditional curing, I did have one advantage: the medicine men worried that younger men were no longer attracted to their specialization, and that their knowledge would be lost unless it was written down. But witchcraft was a perilous topic.

After our first interview, Uncle Joe had agreed to a return visit when he had more time, and informed Junior that he was going to tell us about “Mountain Wise.” We were elated, for Junior believed that Mountain Wise would be directly connected with witchcraft. I was more than excited about this impending breakthrough, for I had only a few months in which to work on what was proving to be a daunting research assignment. In previous interviews with otherwise very cooperative medicine men (not relatives of Junior’s), an air of evasiveness about our topic had come through even in translation.

As the date of our next meeting with Uncle Joe approached, I stopped in Gallup and purchased, at Junior’s suggestion, a fine watermelon—an esteemed delicacy on the hot New Mexico desert. We arrived at Uncle Joe’s remote homestead and settled down to exchange the usual pleasantries. About ten minutes later, I suddenly remembered the watermelon in my pickup truck. I sprang up to get it and presented it to Uncle Joe with a little speech that I thought was properly low key. Junior translated. The pleasantries continued. But even with adjustments I had learned to make for the slow pace of Navajo social intercourse, these informal exchanges seemed to be continuing for much longer than usual. Then, to my consternation, Junior announced that it was time for us to go. I had no idea what was wrong.

As we rode away in the jolting pickup truck, my fatal mistake was explained. I had behaved very aggressively, as Navajos would see it, by proffering the gift almost immediately when we arrived. In due time the watermelon would have been greatly appreciated, but I had utterly botched it. I asked if the damage was irreparable, and Junior told me it was serious. In fact, we returned to Uncle Joe’s homestead several times after that and Uncle Joe was always away somewhere, with an indeterminate time of return. I never learned the secret of Mountain Wise, for other medicine men we interviewed professed to know nothing about it.

I recognized that my problem was a major one of etiquette: by Navajo standards I had been far too aggressive. Today I would say that I had run afoul of an egalitarian ethos, but in 1961 anthropologists had not yet given it that name. When I returned from the reservation after this three-month stint, my reaction to such extreme cultural differences was rather inchoate. I did remain favorably impressed with the Navajo way of doing business socially, and with the demeanor of the people—which was unobtrusive, gentle, humorous, and sincere. At the same time I was mystified by the severity of Uncle Joe’s reaction. Service (1962) and especially Fried (1967) were about to focus on and define egalitarian society, and certain aspects of my experience would fall into place when I read Service’s book.

Only five years later did I really begin to understand the political dynamics in which I had been involved. In 1966 I had the good fortune to discuss Navajo psychological ways with Jean Briggs, a colleague in graduate school who had just returned from living with a group of nomadic Eskimos in northern Canada, near Back River. Although they had recently been “missionized,” the Utku were still living a fully nomadic life devoted to hunting and gathering. Our conversations began just as Morton Fried was preparing to publish his 1967 book on political evolution. As I learned more about the Utku and their all-but-obsessive intolerance for displays of anger, aggression, or dominance, I began to comprehend more fully my experiences with the Navajos and the wider implications of my faux pas.

My continuing mystification about the low-key emotional style of social interaction I had briefly encountered resonated with Briggs’s in-depth experiences of a similar culture, in which she lived for about two years. To provide further qualitative flesh to this preliminary glimpse of egalitarianism, I shall expound on one of her more difficult experiences in considerable depth. I do not recount the experience as I remember it from our conversations puzzling over similarities between Navajos and Eskimos; rather, it is drawn from the sensitive and thorough final treatment that appears in her book Never in Anger (Briggs 1970; see also Briggs 1982).

Anthropologist as Serious Upstart

Briggs’s liberal inclusion of her personal feelings and reactions in her published ethnography was both radical methodologically and prescient in terms of certain recent trends in ethnography. As I write, many cultural anthropologists have created for themselves a much-discussed “identity crisis,” based in part on the assumption that before they came along, their predecessors essentially were ignoring their own roles in the research equation. Over the past several decades a great deal of debate has taken place about the validity of leaving out the ethnographer as a culturally biased instrument of description. Yet from this debate have come only modest substantive advances in the anthropological capacity to fulfill our most basic obligation as a humanistic and scientific discipline. That mission is to accurately record, and explain, the varieties of humanity and its natural history.

Briggs, instead of mainly talking about this problem, went ahead and resolved it quite brilliantly. Indeed, if one wishes to see a full, honest, and relatively uncontrolled account of how an anthropologist interacts with and reacts to a native culture while trying to describe it, hers is probably the most candid and effective portrayal in the ethnographic literature. One reason her book is so effective ethnographically is that it portrays Utku political culture so well from the standpoint of political psychology.

Briggs lived continuously with a small Utku band near Back River for long enough to know the language well, and in 1965 she came back to Cambridge just as I was returning from doctoral fieldwork with Montenegrin Serbs in southern Herzegovina. The Utkuhikhalingmiut Eskimos live above the Arctic Circle, and Jean studied a group of fewer than three dozen nomadic hunters who had been Christianized several decades before her arrival. Because of her formal adoption into an Eskimo family, her vantage point as ethnographic observer was particularly intimate. Indeed, her integration into the indigenous social life proceeded to a degree that few anthropologists experience.

Eventually, as adoptive daughter and band member, Briggs was literally ostracized. For three long months she was obliged to live at the social periphery of the band that had adopted her. The reason for her social isolation is directly relevant to our exploration of antiauthoritarian sanctioning. To understand what happened to Briggs, we must take up her fascinating and ultimately painful story at the beginning (Briggs 1970:41).

I had been camped at the Rapids for a week when the caribou hunters returned—first Nilak’s family, then, two days later, Inuttiaq’s. And within another day or two Inuttiaq had adopted me. Inuttiaq was to become the most significant figure, both personally and anthropologically, in my life at Back River. When I think of him now, my feelings are a complex blend of admiration, affectionate gratitude, and a helpless desire to compensate him somehow for the difficulties that my un-Eskimo behavior created for him and his family. At the time, however, my predominant feeling toward him was, all too frequently, irritation. Inuttiaq was not a typical Utku: he was more assertive than most, and from the outset I came into conflict with this quality in him.

Anthropologists seldom reveal so much of their feelings, but Briggs (1970:41–42) goes further, painting a miniature portrait of Eskimo attitudes about the expression of emotion:

It was from Inuttiaq that I learned most about the ways in which the Utku express their feelings toward one another. It was partly his very atypicality that made it possible for me to learn from him what the proper patterns are. Most other Utku were so well controlled that my untutored eye could not detect their emotions. But Inuttiaq was, if I have read him correctly, an unusually intense person. He, too, kept strict control of his feelings, but in his case one was aware that something was being controlled. The effort of his control was caught in the flash of an eye, quickly subdued, in the careful length of a pause, or the painstaking neutrality of a reply. Occasionally, when he failed to stay within acceptable bounds of expression, I learned from the disapproval of others what behavior constitutes a lapse and how disapproval is expressed. Living in Inuttiaq’s own dwellings, as I did for two winters, I watched him with others: as father and husband, as host to his neighbors, and as religious leader of the community. The turbulence of my own relationship with him also gave me many opportunities to observe his efforts at control.

Briggs (1970:42–44) places these personal reactions in cultural perspective:

In a society in which people seem to blend harmoniously with the brown tundra, Inuttiaq stood out. In a different society he might have been a leader, but Utku society allows little scope for would-be leaders. The Utku, like other Eskimo bands, have no formal leaders whose authority transcends that of the separate householders. Moreover, cherishing independence of thought and action as a natural prerogative, people tend to look askance at anyone who seems to aspire to tell them what to do…. There was nothing mild about him. Even in photographs his personality is so vividly communicated that people who have never seen Eskimos single him out of a group, asking who he is…. I thought him haughty and hostile in appearance, very un-Eskimo in both feature and expression. He did not smile; he looked hard at me in the few moments before we were introduced, making no move. He did smile as we shook hands, but I could not read in the smile either the warm friendliness or the gentle shyness that I had come to expect from unknown Eskimos.

Briggs (1970:46) says that Inuttiaq proved to be something of a clown, but also a showoff who dramatized himself in ways that were politically controversial in his own culture.

Nevertheless, Inuttiaq was considered a fine person. It seemed to me curious that it should be so in a society that places a high value on mildness and gentleness. Perhaps it was partly that people enjoyed watching Inuttiaq play a role that they themselves would have liked to play. Very important, too, I think, was the fact that control of temper is a cardinal virtue among Eskimos, and Inuttiaq never lost his temper.

This forbearance applies to people, but not to the dogs on which Eskimos rely so strongly. They beat their dogs, and Inuttiaq did so with a fury that was unusual. Even his fantasies were particularly violent, “full of stabbings, whippings, and murders.” Briggs (1970:47–48) goes on to say:

Other people seemed to have a sense, similar to mine, of Inuttiaq’s inner intensity. They feared him for the very reason they admired him: because he never lost his temper. They said that a man who never lost his temper could kill if he ever did become angry; so, I was told, people took care not to cross him, and I had the impression that Allaq, his wife, ran more quickly than other wives to do her husband’s bidding.

Looking back, I wonder if Inuttiaq might have been partially aware of people’s fear of him. It occurs to me that a desire to reassure people, in addition to the obvious desire to attract attention, might have been one of the motives behind his joking. One day when he was teasing a fourteen-year-old by grabbing for his penis—a favorite game of his, and his alone—he said to me: “I’m joking; people joke a great deal. People who joke are not frightening….”

The feeling Inuttiaq was expressing is one that is very characteristic of Eskimos: a fear of people who do not openly demonstrate their good-will by happy behavior, by smiling, laughing, and joking. Unhappiness is often equated with hostility in the Eskimo view. A moody person may be planning to knife you in the back when you are out fishing with him, claiming on return that you drowned. In the old days he might have been plotting to abscond with your wife—a common occurrence prior to the introduction of Christ and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Even without harboring specific evil designs an unhappy person may harm one, merely by the power of his moody thoughts. It is believed that strong thoughts (ihumaquqtuuq) can kill or cause illness; and people take great pains to satisfy others’ wishes so that resentment will not accumulate in the mind. A happy person, on the other hand, is a safe person. I wondered whether Inuttiaq felt an exceptionally strong need to show himself a happy person because he was not.

Briggs originally traveled to the Arctic to study Utku shamanism. She was shocked to discover that in spite of their traditional pattern of nomadic subsistence the Utku had been converted to Christianity and professed no further interest in shamanism. While Inuttiaq was the religious leader of his group, having occupied a vacancy left by a member of a different family, he did not fill the bill as a traditional band leader by dint of exceptional hunting ability or knowledge of environmental conditions relevant to subsistence. The traditional man of informal influence was one with a “reputation for wisdom, for skill in hunting or in other matters.” He was “an ihumataaq (one who has wisdom) and his views may weigh more than other men’s, when plans are being made.” Inuttiaq was merely average in this respect (Briggs 1970:42–43).

Briggs (1970:55–58) tells us in detail how religious services were conducted in iglus and how Inuttiaq (in the role of religious coordinator) tried at certain points to get his tiny congregation to stand. The community initially conformed, but then more and more people began to disregard his orders until the majority were ignoring him. At that point, he simply stopped trying to command them. Briggs likens this attempt of Inuttiaq to introduce an item of etiquette, one that allowed him to manipulate his fellows, to the machinations of traditional shamans who manipulated a belief system to augment their own power. She also points out that the Anglican ministers who trained lay leaders like Inuttiaq were prone to act in the same way.

When we evaluate Inuttiaq’s relations with others in a tiny band of fewer than thirty, it is evident that he could not subtly manipulate the group as a whole. The members would simply ignore him and thereby defeat his culturally illegitimate aspirations through disobedience. Obviously, individual fear of this man was not sufficient to inhibit such expressions of social control when the group was in a position to act as a unit, and as a result he was unable to increase his power. I suggested earlier that much egalitarian control is preemptive, and here we have an excellent example. My assumption is that there was little actual threat in being commanded to stand or sit during the church service; for members of the band, the issue was where such boldness might lead. Keep in mind that Inuttiaq could legitimately give orders to his wife and to younger male kinsmen—that was none of the band’s business.

Although Inuttiaq’s treatment of his wife and dogs may have been unusually assertive, basically he walked a proper line in his little moral community. Briggs’s psychological profile makes it clear that although by dint of personality he was prone to push his prerogatives, he also was aware of probable group reactions. As a person the group recognized as a potential upstart, he never came close to being ostracized, let alone being dealt with physically. If he went too far in trying to regiment the group’s church services, Inuttiaq managed to hold onto his position of respect in the community by not pressing the issue when his manipulations were ignored. While others were subject to ostracism, Inuttiaq managed to steer a safe course in spite of his personality.

At first, Briggs’s understanding of ostracism was secondhand via a socially inept woman named Niqi. Her emotionally unruly family was kept at a distance by the rest of the band even though the members were not wholly excluded from group social life and sharing of food. Niqi herself was known for regularly becoming irritated in ways that adult Inuit normally manage to mask; in compensation she smiled much too broadly (Briggs 1970:218). One problem, then, was that her personal style was too volatile for a people who were averse to exhibitions of strong emotion, and of anger in particular. In addition, Niqi’s small family tended not to share food as much as other families in the band, and stayed socially separate in a number of ways.

Band members were resentful of her family as would-be free riders who were deemed stingy and jealous, and also as people who did not keep their emotions under control. Briggs (1970:214–223) details the quiet grumbling and factional hostility that developed out of these tensions, and notes that very direct hints were made that Niqi should participate in the camp women’s tasks, such as cooking fish heads for everybody. At length, these well-masked but hostile signals drew Niqi away from her own family’s subsistence activities, if only briefly, to make a contribution to group subsistence. But she quickly went back to her former ways, and the social distancing of her family continued. The tensions rose and fell, and Niqi’s social status vacillated between grudging acceptance and semiostracism. The rest of the group distanced Niqi’s family mainly because of Niqi’s bad temper, stinginess, and failure to help, and the family tended to camp away from the core group.

The problem with Niqi had little to do with her trying to control or belittle other people or aggrandize herself, so basically antiauthoritarian values were not involved. However, one of the features advocated by an egalitarian ethos is sharing, and Niqi did not share very well. Furthermore, she aroused the group’s sensitivity to people who did not control angry feelings, and this trait too is pertinent to egalitarian sanctioning. Any individual who combines anger with a tendency to dominate becomes dangerous socially, and with the Utku all expressions of anger were troublesome.

As an American, Briggs was similarly unable to control what to her were minor hostile feelings, or to hide her seriously upsetting disappointments and frustrations. Because of what were to them culturally bizarre, volatile emotional reactions, the Utku first perceived Briggs as a curiosity, then as a recalcitrant child, and finally as a serious irritant and a potential threat. Jean was living far from home under primitive circumstances, a situation that tended to make her touchy and prone to tears. She also had difficulty being generous with prized trade goods she had brought along, in that everyone competed for them. In addition, at times she showed an inappropriate willingness to come into conflict with her adoptive father. She later learned that the Utku were actually afraid of her because she dealt with her emotions in an open, “American” way.

Problems were inevitable for a person who had formally been adopted as a family member yet constantly had to be transcribing field notes, and Briggs often failed to understand subtle Eskimo hints about how she might fit in better. She continued to be emotional and—in her hosts’ eyes—aggressively willful. Eventually, a pointed religious sermon (directed at the entire group) expounded on the evils of getting angry. This she certainly did understand.

The pressures of life in the Arctic made self-control difficult, however. Once when slush fell from the top of the iglu into her typewriter, Briggs in a fit of pique picked up a knife and threw it vigorously into a pile of fish on the floor in front of company. The iglu emptied immediately. Another time she made the mistake of conveying in strong terms her hatred of the frozen fish that was a staple in her diet; she did so simply because she was having difficulty removing the scales. What were temporary flare-ups for the American were, for the Utku, long-remembered signs of potential trouble.

Eskimos worry about even small expressions of anger because they see all anger as deep, long-lasting, and dangerous (Briggs 1970:261), and any lack of self-control as personally threatening. As time went on, Briggs as “Kapluna Daughter” realized she was a social irritant—someone who would never be able to maintain the equanimity of a proper Utku for very long. She was not semiostracized like Niqi, but relations periodically became rather strained. Then an episode took place that brought a far more ominous reaction.

Several sportsmen who had flown in by seaplane were borrowing the Utku’s two rather fragile, irreplaceable canoes for fishing. The Utku approach to such exploitation, which they resented in spite of some trading with the whites, was to acquiesce to every request. Having been told in private about their resentment, Briggs made the mistake of actively intervening after the whites ruined one of the Utku canoes and still wanted to use the last one. She explained heatedly that the Utku depended on the canoes, and the guide replied that if the canoe’s owner did not choose to lend the boat they would do without it. Inuttiaq, put on the spot by Briggs, agreed to let the sportsmen use this last boat for fishing. Briggs could not hide her anger at both parties. She strode away from the scene to weep in her tent, unaware that her behavior had been the last straw.

Happening to read a letter in transit, she learned that the band was fed up with her anger and scolding and wished she would leave. At first, their disenchantment was far from obvious. After the incident people continued to behave cordially and generously toward their turbulent visitor when she approached them—but she noticed that they were coming to visit her far less often, and stayed only briefly. Before long they began in subtle ways to discourage her own visits. It became evident that she was being ostracized like Niqi—but during the period of estrangement it also emerged that the Utku were willing to let her rehabilitate herself. Indeed, whenever she was able to control her feelings and avoid emotionalized negativity for a time, they began to respond positively. The problem was that Briggs could not maintain the flawless equanimity that the situation seemed to demand. She was being distanced, it hurt, and when she broke down and showed her frustration, she was distanced even more.

The kind of overt hostility that had triggered the ostracism was scrupulously avoided by the Utku in applying their sanction. Briggs was basically left alone in her tent with very few callers, and even their visits became perfunctory compared to her earlier rich social life. People were not outwardly impolite, they simply set up a great deal of social distance. By good luck, after some months of this treatment a third party provided the Utku with some insight into why Briggs had tried to deny the canoe to the whites. Once they understood that her anger had been on their behalf and against unscrupulous men who cared nothing for their welfare, they eventually relaxed the social barriers they had so carefully erected and maintained.

Briggs has developed the following psychodynamic interpretation of the facts (and surely she is correct). This ostracism was atypical, because it involved two cultures with very different standards of what is proper in emotional self-expression (see Briggs 1970:274–307), and also because the group’s grievance was based in part on a substantive misunderstanding. It was typical, though, in that a reduction in social interaction became a tool of the community against someone whose inappropriate and frightening aggressiveness was suggestive of upstartism. For more than a year the Utku, willing to make concessions about cultural differences, had put up with displays of anger and frustration from Briggs that they would not have accepted from other Utku without engaging in moralistic aggression. But finally their adoptive daughter went too far.

As a political anthropologist, I might add that it was when Briggs tried to assert herself in the role of spokesman for the group (she thought she was implementing the band’s intentions, but they failed to understand this) that the ostracism process began in earnest. In effect, the foreign visitor arbitrarily tried to make a decision that involved the entire group. My reading of the boat situation is more “political,” whereas Briggs’s is more “psychological”; but the two interpretations in no way conflict. Both her interference in the decision process and the “un-Eskimo” emotions that came into play had a severe negative impact. This political interpretation of mine is borne out by one further fact (see Briggs 1970:302). After the social isolation had ended and Briggs was once again a regular member of the society, Inuttiaq once said to her out of the blue, “I think you’re a leader in your own country.”

In the cross-cultural survey to follow shortly, we shall encounter a similar theme having to do with aggressive anger and its effect on self-control, chiefly with respect to leaders. There we shall be focusing on reactions to hunters who, as leaders or in other capacities, try to dominate or control their peers—the other adult men (and women) in their groups. We shall see that sanctions harsher than the social distancing Briggs experienced can and do come into play, even though the more passive type of resistance that Inuttiaq met with in the church service also is employed.

For Briggs, the consequences could have been worse. She could have been severely ostracized by her adoptive group—shunned, instead of merely becoming something of a nonperson. If a forager is seriously ostracized (in the sense that no one will speak to him, literally, or cooperate with him economically), his very means of livelihood may be threatened. A still more grave form of social distancing is to expel him from the group, and of course the ultimate distancing is execution. Unlike Inuttiaq, some individuals are so insensitive to the group’s collective commitment to egalitarianism that they leave their peers no other recourse.

The “up” side of Briggs’s desperate story is that she always had the option of being reintegrated into her Eskimo band if only she could curb her anger. Social control tends to be about more than mere elimination of social threats by means of punishment: often it is about prosocially oriented manipulation of deviants so that they can once more contribute usefully to group life. Briggs managed to leave the Utku on reasonably favorable terms: they were socializing almost as cordially as they had before the ostracism incident by the time she returned to the comforts—and the welcome psychological tolerance—of Harvard Square.

Egalitarian Social Control

These ethnographic tales of woe provide an intimate qualitative glimpse of egalitarianism at work. Intuitively, they help to support my position that political dynamics are at least as important as environmental variables and social structure, in terms of keeping social and political life leveled. They also support the larger hypothesis that the immediate cause of egalitarianism is conscious, and that deliberate social control is directed at preventing the expression of hierarchical tendencies (Boehm 1993).

It is interesting that people living in egalitarian societies must work so aggressively to keep their political order in place. Earlier ethnographic tendencies “beautified” such societies by exaggerating their overall harmony. With more reliable reporting, it is evident that egalitarians regularly have to cope with upstarts, and the willingness of such people to push their own prerogatives against known resistance raises some interesting questions about human nature.

There appear to be two components of this kind of egalitarian social control. One is a small moral community incorporating strong forces for social conformity. Long ago, Maine (1861), Westermarck (1894), and Durkheim (1933) recognized this universal feature of locally autonomous groups of foragers and tribesmen. The other ingredient is the deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males (see Service 1962, 1975; Fried 1967; Lee 1979; Boehm 1982b; Woodburn 1982).

In the qualitative ethnographic survey that follows in Chapter 4, the general hypothesis is that egalitarian bands amount to “intentional societies” (see Boehm 1993). Band members regularly create and maintain egalitarian blueprints for social behavior, “plans” that are implicit or (in part) explicit in the ethos and well understood by the rank and file who implement them. The political notions and dynamics involved are not restricted to mobile foragers, for tribesmen all over the world are similarly egalitarian. Wilson and Sober (1994) have discussed the very similar egalitarian arrangements of modern Mennonites, emphasizing their militant concern for avoiding any development of individual authority or other individual advantage within the group. Their antihierarchical political dynamics are much like those experienced by Utku foragers, and by Navajos as tribal pastoralists.

The dynamics of egalitarian politics are well described by Richard B. Lee, whose accounts of proficient hunters being ridiculed were quoted earlier. Lee has spent a great deal of time with nomadic foragers in the Kalahari Desert, and he explains these dynamics as follows:

Egalitarianism is not simply the absence of a headman and other authority figures, but a positive insistence on the essential equality of all people and a refusal to bow to the authority of others, a sentiment expressed in the statement: “Of course we have headmen … each of us is headman over himself.” Leaders do exist, but their influence is subtle and indirect. They never order or make demands of others, and their accumulation of material goods is never more, and often much less, than the average accumulation of the other households in their camp. (Lee 1979:457)

Lee makes it clear that it is fear of group opinion—and fear of active group sanctions—that keeps the more accomplished men at this level of humility. In effect, the group is dominating its would-be alphas, and among these !Kung-speaking Kalahari foragers arrogance amounts to a crime. Stinginess is also viewed as a serious form of deviance, but it is the arrogant person who is potentially dangerous.

The political focus is on males, and the !Kung’s own words are of interest: “Each of us is headman over himself.” This credo is a response to interrogation by an anthropologist who (I assume) was curious about the low levels of leadership visible among the !Kung. The informant’s response is not unique among egalitarian hunter-gatherers; they long ago began to encounter outsiders who assumed that “power positions” were natural to every human group.

In the nineteenth century, Europeans increasingly began to encounter nonliterate people living in very small nomadic bands, people who exclusively foraged for a living and changed their place of residence at least several times a year. These hierarchical strangers usually wanted something from the “natives,” and for that reason regularly asked to speak with the “chief.” Given their own political backgrounds in nations where figures of authority were abundant, it was perfectly natural to ask for the person in charge. The absence of any individualized authority at the group level led sometimes to practical frustration, and often to political wonder—or amazement.

Accounts abound of explorers meeting egalitarians, but only rarely have indigenous counterreactions to these so-called civilized reactions been published. I provide one further illustration, to complement that offered by Lee and also to raise the issue of female equality in egalitarian bands. This episode was recounted by an Englishman who worked in Tierra del Fuego (at the southern extremity of South America) with nomadic Ona foragers. Missionary Bridges (1948) writes:

The Ona had no hereditary or elected chiefs, but men of outstanding ability almost always became the unacknowledged leaders of their groups. Yet one man might seem leader today and another man tomorrow, according to whoever was eager to embark upon some enterprise. Social rank among the Ona was best defined by the jovial Kankoat in later years. A certain scientist visited our part of the world and, in answer to his inquiries on this matter, I told him that the Ona had no chieftains, as we understand the word. Seeing that he did not believe me, I summoned Kankoat, who by that time spoke some Spanish. When the visitor repeated his question, Kankoat, too polite to answer in the negative, said: “Yes, señor, we, the Ona, have many chiefs. The men are all captains and all the women are sailors.”

This answer echoes that of Lee’s informant, and it offers more than an interesting cross-cultural dialogue in which visiting scientist and acculturated forager are trying to cope with mutually exotic political systems. The old man’s reply specifies or implies two postulates that hold true generally in nomadic foraging bands. One is that egalitarianism and the attendant lack of authoritative leaders pertain to relations among the band’s main political actors, in this case male household heads, while within the family the authority of one person over another is much more free to develop (see Fried 1967). The other factor, discussed in Chapter 1, is the apparent widespread tendency for male hunters to actively dominate their mates within the domestic unit (see Lee 1982; Kelly 1995).

Kelly (1995:262–292) believes that because males almost always do the large-game hunting and because such food is shared by the entire group, they tend to gain political clout. I agree. Certainly it is the men who bring in meat in the largest quantities, and forager groups regularly praise and respect their proficient hunters. Men also bring home more calories overall than women (Ember 1978). This special productivity tends to give males higher prestige than females, but the degree to which women are dominated by their husbands seems to be quite variable when bands are compared across continents.

Gender is important, obviously; but egalitarian social control is not necessarily based on gender. It is merely a mobile hunting band’s way of keeping any one individual from gaining too much sway, and it is directed at the group’s main political actors, whoever they may be. Empirically, social control does seem to be focused on the adult males of the band. Males are physically stronger than females, it is they who account for almost all the homicides, and because they hunt it is they who may try to control the distribution of meat—unless the group divests them of this prerogative. If a female were to pursue a power position, say by employing special supernatural gifts, she would be equally a target of a group whose households are jealous of their autonomy and wish to be intimidated by no one. As Jean Briggs discovered, a hunting band will use social control against any adult who begins to be assertive in an objectionable way.

CHAPTER

3

Putting Down Aggressors