Preface. One of my favorite books was Bruce Chatwin’s “Songlines” about how aborigines were included by the Australian government in the building of a new railroad so that sacred sites could be avoided and they could add the rail line into their songs. These songs also helped them navigate across the continent and find welcome wherever they went. Native Americans could also travel and be welcomed by their clans far away, and since sign language was universal, were able to communicate wherever they went.
This is backed up in “Dawn” — there is new evidence that people in tribes were not as biologically related as we’ve assumed. I’ve always been enchanted by the idea of group selection, so I can’t help but wonder that as more evidence is gathered that this is true, will that make theories about group selection less likely? Or perhaps more if people leave a tribe to join up with one that has better weapons, a stronger Goddess, nicer habitat enabling that tribe to win in conflicts with others? If nothing else, it is a good way to prevent inbreeding, which is now proffered as one reason Neanderthals went extinct.
The ability to travel is one of my favorite aspects of this book, because being able to escape and find a better tribe or start your own is the ultimate freedom.
I wonder if the threat of members leaving might hold some wanna-be dictators in check as well, or if this spurred societies on to better governance and ways of living to attract new members? This book doesn’t touch on that, but what an incentive for tribes to evolve by improving their governance and freedoms, perhaps by borrowing ideas from distant clan members visiting them.
Also of interest is that Graeber & Wengrow point out the travel trend in cities was to not venture more than a few miles over a lifetime, and only globalization changed that [which I would point out, was only made possible by fossil fuels, and put on steroids with containerization — see Levine’s “The Box]. Travel also expanded trade.
In summary the authors write “The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today.”
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
We’ve already had occasion to mention how the same basic repertoire of clan names could be found distributed more or less everywhere across Turtle Island (the indigenous name for the North American continent). There were endless local differences, but there were also consistent alliances, so that it was possible for a traveler hailing from a Bear, or Wolf or Hawk clan in what’s now Georgia to travel all the way to Ontario or Arizona and find someone obliged to host them at almost any point in between. This seems all the more remarkable when one considers that literally hundreds of different languages were spoken in North America, belonging to half a dozen completely unrelated language families. This was one reason for the North American’s famous development of sign language.
Clans played a key role in diplomacy: not just in providing hospitality to travelers, but organizing the protocol for diplomatic missions, the paying of compensation to prevent wars, or the incorporation of prisoners, who could simply be assigned a name and thereby become a clan member in their new community – even the replacement for someone who had died in that very conflict. The system appeared to be designed to maximize people’s capacity to move, individually or collectively, or for that matter to reshuffle social arrangements.
Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them. Both have totemic clans, raising the question of whether such systems are typical forms of long-distance organization. If nothing else, the common stereotype that ‘primitive’ peoples saw anyone outside their particular local group only as enemies appears to be entirely groundless.
In what anthropologists refer to as totemic systems, of the kind just discussed for Australia and North America, the responsibility of care takes on a particularly extreme form. To be without an owner is to be exposed, unprotected. Each human clan is said to ‘own’ a certain species of animal – thus making them the ‘Bear clan’, ‘Elk clan’, ‘Eagle clan’ and so forth – but what this means is precisely that members of that clan cannot hunt, kill, harm or otherwise consume animals of that species. In fact, they are expected to take part in rituals that promote its existence and make it flourish.
North American societies were, with few exceptions, marked by low birth rates and low population densities, which in turn facilitated mobility and made it easier for agriculturalists to shift back to a mode of subsistence more oriented to hunting, fishing and foraging; or simply to relocate entirely.
Clans allowed for widespread travel and diplomacy in North America
We’ve already had occasion to mention how the same basic repertoire of clan names could be found distributed more or less everywhere across Turtle Island (the indigenous name for the North American continent). There were endless local differences, but there were also consistent alliances, so that it was possible for a traveler hailing from a Bear, or Wolf or Hawk clan in what’s now Georgia to travel all the way to Ontario or Arizona and find someone obliged to host them at almost any point in between. This seems all the more remarkable when one considers that literally hundreds of different languages were spoken in North America, belonging to half a dozen completely unrelated language families.
A clan typically had a fixed stock of names which were assigned to children. A community, moreover, was never made up of just one clan. There were usually quite a number, grouped together into two halves (or moieties), which acted as rivals and complements to one another, competing against one another in sports and burying one another’s dead. This fusing of titles and names is a peculiarly North American phenomenon. Some version of it appears almost everywhere on Turtle Island, but almost nowhere else in the world do we see anything quite like it.
Clans played a key role in diplomacy: not just in providing hospitality to travelers, but organizing the protocol for diplomatic missions, the paying of compensation to prevent wars, or the incorporation of prisoners, who could simply be assigned a name and thereby become a clan member in their new community – even the replacement for someone who had died in that very conflict. The system appeared to be designed to maximize people’s capacity to move, individually or collectively, or for that matter to reshuffle social arrangements.
Travel to get away from the In-Laws
Dunbar considers such ‘nested’ arrangements to be among the factors which shaped human cognition in deep evolutionary time, such that even today a whole plethora of institutions that require high levels of social commitment, from military brigades to church congregations, still tend to gravitate around the original figure of 150 relationships. It’s a fascinating hypothesis. As formulated by evolutionary psychologists, it hinges on the idea that living hunter-gatherers do actually provide evidence for this supposedly ancient way of scaling social relationships upwards from core family units to bands and residential groups,
There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else.
New work on the demography of modern hunter-gatherers – drawing statistical comparisons from a global sample of cases, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Australian Martu – shows that residential groups turn out not to be made up of biological kin at all; and the burgeoning field of human genomics is beginning to suggest a similar picture for ancient hunter-gatherers as well, all the way back to the Pleistocene.
It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we’d say ‘all men are brothers’ when trying to express internationalism (even if we can’t stand our actual brother and haven’t spoken to him for years). What’s more, the shared metaphor often extended over very long distances, as we’ve seen with the way that Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America, or moiety systems across Australia. This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome.
It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. This might seem odd, but from the perspective of cognitive science it makes perfect sense. It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates.
For much of human history, the geographical range in which most human beings were operating was actually shrinking. Palaeolithic ‘culture areas’ spanned continents. Mesolithic and Neolithic culture zones still covered much wider areas than the home territory of most contemporary ethno-linguistic groups (what anthropologists refer to as ‘cultures’). Cities were part of that process of contraction, since urbanites could, and many did, spend almost their entire lives within a few miles’ radius – something that would hardly have been conceivable for people of an earlier age.
The overall direction of history – at least until very recently – would seem to be the very opposite of globalization. It is one of increasingly local allegiances: extraordinary cultural inventiveness, but much of it aimed at finding new ways for people to set themselves off against each other. True, the larger regional networks of hospitality endured in some places. Overall, though, what we observe is not so much the world as a whole getting smaller, but most peoples’ social worlds growing more parochial, their lives and passions more likely to be circumscribed by boundaries of culture, class and language.
The proliferation of separate social and cultural universes – confined in space and relatively bounded – must have contributed in various ways to the emergence of more durable and intransigent forms of domination.
The mixed composition of so many foraging societies clearly indicates that individuals were routinely on the move for a plethora of reasons, including taking the first available exit route if one’s personal freedoms were threatened at home.
Cultural porosity is also necessary for the kind of seasonal demographic pulses that made it possible for societies to alternate periodically between different political arrangements, forming massive congregations at one time of year, then dispersing into a multitude of smaller units for the remainder.
Simply put, it’s difficult to exercise arbitrary power in, say, January over someone you will be facing on equal terms again come July.
The hardening and multiplication of cultural boundaries can only have reduced such possibilities. The emergence of local cultural worlds during the Mesolithic made it more likely that a relatively self-contained society might abandon seasonal dispersal and settle into some kind of full-time, top-down, hierarchical arrangement. In our terms, to get stuck. But of course, this in itself hardly explains why any particular society did, in fact, get stuck in such arrangements.
The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.
TRADE: for the sake of travel, relationships, gambling and more
Trade was not just an economic activity, it was embedded in a network of social relations. Archaeologists tend to assume that the ultimate point is profit, prestige, increased status. But the phenomenon of travel is its own reward, to experience remote places, acquire exotic materials and more.
If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form; therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from the Gulf of Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Markets are universal. Therefore, there must have been a market. Therefore, markets are universal.
But anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.
In Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.
Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialties – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time
Curers in much of North America were also entertainers, and would often develop significant entourages; those who felt their lives had been saved by the performance would, typically, offer up all their material possessions to be divided among the troupe. By such means, precious objects could easily travel very long distances.
Women in many indigenous North American societies were inveterate gamblers; the women of adjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a game played with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet their shell beads or other objects of personal adornment as the stakes. Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and other exotica discovered in sites halfway across the continent had got there by being endlessly wagered, and lost, in inter-village games of this sort, over very long periods of time.