Preface. Why do many societies near each other have such different values, beliefs, mythology, and governance? In “Dawn of Everything”, the authors suggest that it’s because:
“If everyone was broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to, and if knowledge of foreign customs, arts and technologies was widespread, or at least easily available, then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbors. Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Athabascans in Alaska refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats, while the Inuit refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.
What was true of particular cultures was equally true of culture areas or ‘civilizations’. Since almost any existing style, form or technique has always been potentially available to almost anyone, these too must always have come about through some such combination of borrowing and refusal.
This process tends to be quite self-conscious.
It is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbors that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups. Framed in this way, the question of how ‘culture areas’ formed is necessarily a political one. It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another.
From the Klamath River northwards, there existed societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which, traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves. But none of this was the case further south. How exactly did this happen? How did a boundary emerge between one extended ‘family’ of foraging societies that habitually raided each other for slaves, and another that did not keep slaves at all?”
This adds to the overall argument of the book that we can act to define our ways of life. We will be forced to be steady state and live within renewable boundaries after fossil fuels crash, so rather than try to invent a steady state economy, we should be far more ambitious — based on the many examples of how societies governed themselves in the past, what would an ideal society be like in the future? After the worst disaster to mankind, people will be looking for guidance, you young energy aware readers will be in a position to offer ideas about better ways to live in the future.
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.
How do cultures come to define themselves so differently from their neighbors?
When Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera in 1492, these lands were home to hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of inhabitants. They were foragers, but about as different from the Hadza, Mbuti or!Kung as one can imagine. Living in an unusually bounteous environment, often occupying villages year-round, the indigenous peoples of California, for example, were notorious for their industry and, in many cases, near-obsession with the accumulation of wealth.
From the perspective of indigenous Californians, who could hardly have failed to notice the nearby presence – particularly among their Southwest neighbors – of tropical crops, including maize corn, which first arrived there from Mesoamerica around 4,000 years ago. While the free peoples of North America’s eastern seaboard nearly all adopted at least some food crops, those of the West Coast uniformly rejected them. Indigenous peoples of California were not pre-agricultural. If anything, they were anti-agricultural.
The systematic nature of this rejection of agriculture is a fascinating phenomenon in itself. Most who attempt to explain it nowadays appeal almost entirely to environmental factors: relying on acorns or pine nuts as one’s staple in California, or aquatic resources further north, was simply ecologically more efficient than the maize agriculture adopted in other parts of North America. No doubt this was true on the whole, but in an area spanning several thousand miles and a wide variety of different ecosystems, it seems unlikely that there was not a single region where maize cultivation would have been advantageous.
And if efficiency was the only consideration, one would have to imagine there were some cultigens – beans, squash, pumpkins, watermelons, any one of an endless variety of leafy vegetables – that someone, somewhere along the coast might have found worth adopting.
The systematic rejection of all domesticated foodstuffs is even more striking when one realizes that many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco, as well as other plants – such as springbank clover and Pacific silverweed – which they used for ritual purposes, or as luxuries consumed only at special feasts. In other words, they were perfectly familiar with the techniques for planting and tending to cultigens. Yet they comprehensively rejected the idea of planting everyday foodstuffs or treating crops as staples.
One reason this rejection is significant is that it offers a clue as to how one might answer the much broader question we posed – but then left dangling – at the beginning of Chapter Four: what is it that causes human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbors? Recall how, after the end of the last Ice Age, the archaeological record is increasingly characterized by ‘culture areas’: that is, localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe, rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth.
Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. It is curious how little anthropologists speculate about why this whole process of subdivision ever happened. It’s usually treated as self-evident, an inescapable fact of human existence. If any explanation is offered, it’s assumed to be an effect of language. Tribes or nations are regularly referred to as ‘ethno-linguistic’ groups; that is, what is really important about them is the fact they share the same language. Those who share the same language are presumed, all other things being equal, also to share the same customs, sensibilities and traditions of family life.
If everyone was broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to, and if knowledge of foreign customs, arts and technologies was widespread, or at least easily available, then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbors. Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Athabascans in Alaska refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats, while the Inuit refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.
What was true of particular cultures was equally true of culture areas or ‘civilizations’. Since almost any existing style, form or technique has always been potentially available to almost anyone, these too must always have come about through some such combination of borrowing and refusal.
This process tends to be quite self-conscious.
It is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbors that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups. Framed in this way, the question of how ‘culture areas’ formed is necessarily a political one. It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another.
From the Klamath River northwards, there existed societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which, traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves. But none of this was the case further south. How exactly did this happen? How did a boundary emerge between one extended ‘family’ of foraging societies that habitually raided each other for slaves, and another that did not keep slaves at all?
The Yurok were famous for the central role that money – which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps – played in every aspect of their social lives.
In dealings between indigenous people, however, it was almost never used to buy or sell anything. Rather, it was employed to pay fines, and as a way of forming and remembering compacts and agreements. This was true in California as well. But in California, unusually, money also seems to have been used in more or less the way we expect money to have been used: for purchases, rentals and loans. In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber
Aboriginal Californians did not hire one another as wage laborers, lend money at interest, or invest the profits of commercial ventures to expand production. There were no ‘capitalists’ in the literal sense. What there was, however, was a remarkable cultural emphasis on private property. All property, whether natural resources, money or items of wealth, was ‘privately and usually individually owned’, including fishing, hunting and gathering grounds. Such a highly developed concept of property requires the use of money, such that in Northwest California ‘money buys everything – wealth, resources, food, honor and wives.’
They took it for granted that we are all born equal, and that it is up to each of us to make something of ourselves through self-discipline, self-denial and hard work.
Perhaps the classic historical example (in both senses of the term ‘classic’) would be the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, in the fifth century BC. Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted … Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to village, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic: one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies … Athens and Sparta were antitypes.
Each society performs a mirror image of the other. In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ego, the necessary and ever-present example of what one should never wish to be. Might a similar logic apply to the history of foraging societies in California and on the Northwest Coast?
The ‘spirit’ of northern Californian foragers was at root, a series of ethical imperatives, the moral demand to work and by extension pursue gain; the moral demand of self-denial; and the individuation of moral responsibility. Bound up in this was a passion for individual autonomy. Yurok men scrupulously avoided being placed in a situation of debt or ongoing obligation to anyone else. Even the collective management of resources was frowned upon; foraging grounds were individually owned and could be rented out in times of shortfall.
Property was sacred, and not only in the legal sense that poachers could be shot. It also had a spiritual value. Yurok men would often spend long hours meditating on money, while the highest objects of wealth – precious hides and obsidian blades displayed only at festivals – were the ultimate sacra. Yurok struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense as well: ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence – eating, sexual gratification, play or sloth. Big eaters were considered vulgar. Young men and women were lectured on the need to eat slowly and modestly, to keep their bodies slim and lithe.
Wealthy Yurok men would gather every day in sweat lodges, where an almost daily test of these ascetic values was the need to crawl headfirst through a tiny aperture that no overweight body could possibly enter. Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles. Even those who did inherit wealth continued to emphasize their personal hard work, frugality and achievement; and while the rich were expected to be generous towards the less fortunate and look after their own lands and possessions, responsibilities for sharing and caring were modest in comparison with foraging societies almost anywhere else.
Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. They were best known to European ethnologists for the festivals called potlatch, feasts were scenes of dramatic contests, sometimes culminating in the ostentatious destruction of heirloom copper shields and other treasures, which sometimes culminated in the sacrificial killing of slaves.
Each treasure was unique; there was nothing that resembled money. Potlatch was an occasion for gluttony and indulgence, ‘grease feasts’ designed to leave the body shiny and fat. Nobles often compared themselves to mountains, with the gifts they bestowed rolling off them like boulders, to flatten and crush their rivals.
The Northwest Coast group we know best are the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), among whom Boas conducted fieldwork. They became famous for the exuberant ornamentation of their art – their love of masks within masks – and the theatrical stage effects employed in their rituals, including fake blood, trap doors and violent clown-police. All the surrounding societies – including the Nootka, Haida and Tsimshian – appear to have shared the same broad ethos: similarly dazzling material cultures and performances could be found all the way from Alaska south to the area of Washington State. They also shared the same basic social structure, with hereditary ranks of nobles, commoners and slaves. Throughout this entire region, a 1,500-mile strip of land from the Copper River delta to Cape Mendocino, inter-group raiding for slaves was endemic, and had been for as long as anyone could recall.
Nobles alone enjoyed the ritual prerogative to engage with guardian spirits, who conferred access to aristocratic titles, and the right to keep the slaves captured in raids. Commoners, including brilliant artists and craftspeople, were largely free to decide which noble house they wished to align themselves with; chiefs vied for their allegiance by sponsoring feasts, entertainment and vicarious participation in their heroic adventures.
‘Take good care of your people,’ went the elder’s advice to a young Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) chief. ‘If your people don’t like you, you’re nothing.’ In many ways, the behavior of Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relations; or what sociologists speak of as ‘court societies’ – the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily, from which the Mafia derived many of its cultural codes. The followers of any one of these ‘fisher-kings’ rarely numbered more than 100 or 200 people,
All this begins to make the anthropologists’ habit of lumping Yurok notables and Kwakiutl artists together as ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ seem rather silly: the equivalent of saying a Texas oil executive and a medieval Egyptian poet were both ‘complex agriculturalists’ because they ate a lot of wheat.
But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first – a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos – and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment?
Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other? In many ways, the seasonal gatherings of Californian tribes seem exactly to reverse the principles of potlatch. Staple rather than luxury foods were consumed; ritual dances were playful rather than regimented or menacing, often involving the humorous transgression of social boundaries between men and women, children and elders (they seem to be one of the few occasions when the otherwise staid Yurok allowed themselves to have a bit of fun).
So are we talking about the same basic institution (a ‘redistributive feast’) carried out in an entirely different spirit, or two entirely different institutions, or even, potlatch and anti-potlatch? How are we to tell?
Clearly the issue is much broader, and touches on the very nature of ‘culture areas’ and what actually constitutes a threshold or boundary between them. We are looking for a key to this problem. It lies in the institution of slavery, which, as we’ve noted, was endemic on the Northwest Coast but correspondingly absent south of the Klamath River in California. Slaves on the Northwest Coast were hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they were especially involved in the mass harvesting, cleaning and processing of salmon and other anadromous fish. Slavery on the Northwest Coast was a hereditary status: if you were a slave, your children were also fated to be so.
Cemeteries of Middle Pacific age, between 1850 BC and AD 200, reveal extreme disparities in treatments of the dead, something not seen in earlier times. South of Cape Mendocino we seem to be dealing with a different kind of Middle Pacific – a more ‘pacific’ one, in fact.
But we can’t put these differences down to a lack of contact between the two groups. On the contrary, archaeological and linguistic evidence demonstrates extensive movement of people and goods along much of the West Coast. A vibrant, canoe-borne maritime commerce already linked coastal and island societies, conveying valuables such as shell beads, copper, obsidian and a host of organic commodities across the diverse ecologies of the Pacific littoral.
In many of these societies one can observe customs that seem explicitly designed to head off the danger of captive status becoming permanent. Consider, for example, the Yurok requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder. This seems a highly efficient way of making inter-group raiding both fiscally pointless and morally bankrupt.
Californian ‘shatter zone’ were aware of their northern neighbors and saw them as warlike, and as disposed to a life of luxury based on exploiting the labor of those they subdued. It implies they recognized such exploitation as a possibility in their own societies yet rejected it, since keeping slaves would undermine important social values (they would become ‘fat and lazy’). Turning south, to the California shatter zone itself, we find evidence that, in many key areas of social life, the foragers of this region were indeed building their communities, in good schismogenetic fashion, as a kind of mirror image; a conscious inversion of those on the Northwest Coast.
Native Californians seem to have been well aware of the kinds of values they were rejecting. They even institutionalized them in the figure of the clown, whose public antics of sloth, gluttony and megalomania – while offering a platform from which to sound off about local problems and discontents – also seem to parody the most coveted values of a proximate civilization.
How were Amerindian ‘capturing societies’ different from other kinds of slave-holding societies?
Let’s define slavery itself. What makes a slave different from a serf, a peon, captive or inmate is their lack of social ties. In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with other human beings. This is why the English word ‘free’ is actually derived from a root meaning ‘friend’.
Unsurprisingly, the archetypical slaves are usually war captives, who are typically far from home amid people who owe them nothing. There is another practical reason for turning war captives into slaves. A slave’s master has a responsibility to keep them alive in a fit state to work. Most human beings need a good deal of care and resources, and can usually be considered a net economic loss until they are 12 to 15 years old. It rarely makes economic sense to breed slaves – which is why, globally, slaves have so often been the product of military aggression.
Sometimes the foraging peoples – such as the Guaicurú of the Paraguay palm savannah, or the Calusa of Florida Keys – had the upper hand militarily over their agricultural neighbors. In such cases, taking slaves and exacting tribute exempted a portion of the dominant society from basic subsistence chores, and supported the existence of leisured elites. It also supported the training of specialized warrior castes, which in turn created the means for further appropriation and further tribute.
Captives were likened to vanquished prey. Experiencing social death, they would come to be regarded as something more like ‘pets’. While being re-socialized in their captors’ households they had to be nurtured, cooked for, fed and instructed in the proper ways of civilization; in short, domesticated (these tasks were usually women’s work). If the socialization was completed, the captive ceased to be a slave. However, captives could sometimes be kept suspended in social death, as part of a permanent pool of victims awaiting their actual, physical death. Typically they would be killed at collective feasts (akin to the Northwest Coast potlatch) presided over by ritual specialists, and this would sometimes result in the eating of enemy flesh.
True, crops were sent as tribute from nearby conquered villages, but tributary villages also sent servants, and raids on villages further out tended to concentrate on enslaving women, who could serve as concubines, nursemaids and domestics – allowing Guaicurú ‘princesses’, their bodies often completely covered with intricate tattoos and spiral designs painted on daily by their domestics, to devote their days to leisure.
Might there not be a more straightforward explanation for the prevalence of slavery on the Northwest Coast, and its absence further south? It’s easy to express moral disapproval of a practice if there’s not much economic incentive to practice it anyway.
From this perspective, the behavior of indigenous Californians was far from optimal. As we’ve noted, they relied primarily on gathering acorns and pine nuts as staples. In a region as bounteous as California, there’s no obvious reason to do this. Acorns and pine nuts offer tiny individual food packages and require a great deal of labor to process. To render them edible, most varieties require the back-breaking work of leaching and grinding to be carried out, to remove toxins and release nutrients. Nut yields can vary dramatically from one season to the next, a risky pattern of boom and bust.
Fish are both more nutritious and more reliable than nuts. Despite this, salmon and other aquatic foods generally came second to tree crops in Californian diets. Salmon can be harvested and processed in great quantities on an annual basis, and they provide oil and fats as well as protein. In terms of cost-benefit calculations, the peoples of the Northwest Coast are eminently more sensible than Californians
Granted, they also had little choice, since nut-gathering was never a serious option on the Northwest Coast (the main forest species there are conifers). It’s also true that Northwest Coast peoples enjoyed a greater range of fish than Californians, including eulachon (candlefish), intensively exploited for its oil, which was both a staple food and a core ingredient in ‘grease feasts,’.
In the technical language of behavioral ecology, fish are ‘front-loaded’. You have to do most of the work of preparation right away. As a result, one could argue that a decision to rely heavily on fish – while undoubtedly sensible in purely nutritional terms – is also weaving a noose for one’s own neck. It meant investing in the creation of a storable surplus of processed and packaged foods (not just preserved meat, but also fats and oils), which also meant creating an irresistible temptation for plunderers. Acorns and nuts, on the other hand, present neither such risks nor such temptations. They are ‘back-loaded’. Harvesting them was a simple and fairly leisurely affair, and, crucially, there was no need for processing prior to storage.
Instead most of the hard work took place only just before consumption: leaching and grinding to make porridges, cakes and biscuits. (This is the very opposite of smoked fish, which you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.)
Note 52: Joaquin Miller’s 1873 description of acorn gathering from “Life Amongst the Modocs”. Here we passed groves of magnificent oak with trunks six feet in diameter, boughs covered with acorns and matted with mistletoe. Coming down to the banks of the Pit river, we heard the songs and shouts of Indian girls gathering acorns. They were up in the oaks, half covered with mistletoe. They beat the acorns off with sticks, or cut off little branches with tomahawks while older squaws below gathered them off the ground, then threw them over their shoulders in baskets borne by a strap around the forehead’.
Note 53: What the Maidu, Pomo, Miwok, Wintu and other California groups sacrificed in short-term nutritional value they gained over the long term in food security [not in book, but acorns can last for two years].
So there was little point in raiding a store of raw acorns. As a result, there was also no real incentive to develop organized ways of defending these stores against potential raiders. One can begin to see the logic here. Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it’s not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful.
The most obvious difficulty is that the capture of dried fish, or foodstuffs of any kind, was never a significant aim of Northwest Coast inter-group raiding. To put it bluntly, there’s only so many smoked fish one can pile up in a war canoe. And carrying bulk products overland was even more difficult: The main aim of raids was always to capture people, so ‘optimal foraging theory’ and other ‘rational-choice’ approaches seem utterly unable to explain this.
The ultimate causes of slavery didn’t lie in environmental or demographic conditions, but in Northwest Coast concepts of the proper ordering of society; and these, in turn, were the result of political jockeying by different sectors of the population who, as everywhere, had somewhat different perspectives on what a proper society should be. The simple reality is that there was no shortage of working hands in Northwest Coast households. But a good proportion of those hands belonged to aristocratic title holders who felt strongly that they should be exempted from menial work. They might hunt manatees or killer whales, but it was inconceivable for them to be seen building weirs or gutting fish. This was mainly an issue in the spring and summer, when the only limits on fish-harvesting were the number of hands available to process and preserve the catch. Rules of decorum prevented nobles from joining in, while low-ranking commoners would instantly defect to a rival household if pressed too hard or called upon too often. So although aristocrats probably felt commoners should be working like slaves for them, commoners had other opinions.
Slavery probably evolved to have controllable labor at key times of year. So we must conclude that ecology does not explain the presence of slavery on the Northwest Coast. Freedom does. Title-holding aristocrats, locked in rivalry with one another, simply lacked the means to compel their own subjects to support their endless games of magnificence. They were forced to look abroad.
In any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population. No free member of a Northwest Coast household would ever be seen chopping or carrying wood. To do so was to undermine one’s own status, effectively making oneself the equivalent of a slave. Californian chiefs, by contrast, seem to have elevated these exact same activities into a solemn public duty, incorporating them into the core rituals of the sweat lodge.
Further inversions occur in the domains of spiritual and aesthetic life. Artistic traditions of the Northwest Coast are all about spectacle and deception: the theatrical trickery of masks that flicker open and shut, of surface figures pulling the gaze in sharply opposed directions. The native word for ‘ritual’ in most Northwest Coast languages actually translates as ‘fraud’ or ‘illusion’. Californian spirituality provides an almost perfect antithesis. What mattered was cultivation of the inner self through discipline, earnest training, and hard work.
Californian art entirely avoids the use of masks.
As one ethnographer wrote of another Yurok neighbor, the Atsugewi: ‘The ideal individual was both wealthy and industrious. In the first grey haze of dawn he arose to begin his day’s work, never ceasing activity until late at night. Early rising and the ability to go without sleep were great virtues. It was extremely complimentary to say “he doesn’t know how to sleep.”’ Wealthy men – and it should be noted that all these societies were decidedly patriarchal – were typically seen as providers for poorer dependants, improvident folk and foolish drifters, by virtue of their own self-discipline and labor and that of their wives.
With its ‘Protestant’ emphasis on interiority and introspection, Californian spirituality offers a perfect counterpoint to the smoke and mirrors of Northwest Coast ceremonials. Among the Yurok, work properly performed became a way of connecting with a true reality, of which prized objects like dentalia and hummingbird scalps were mere outward manifestations.
In 1865, Captain Spott, for instance, trained for many weeks as he helped the medicine man prepare for the First Salmon ceremony at the mouth of the Klamath River … ‘the old [medicine] man sent him to bring down sweathouse wood. On the way he cried with nearly every step because now he was seeing with his own eyes how it was done.’ … Tears, crying, are of crucial importance in Yurok spiritual training as manifestations of personal yearning, sincerity, humility, and openness.
The Yurok, with their puritanical manners and extraordinary cultural emphasis on work and money, might seem an odd choice to celebrate as anti-slavery heroes (though many Calvinist Abolitionists were not so very different). But of course we’re not introducing them as heroes, any more than we wish to represent their Northwest Coast neighbors as the villains of the piece. We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. Revealingly, the arguments appear to have been most intense precisely in this border zone between anthropological ‘culture areas’.
Almost all the peoples of central and southern California, the Maidu, Wintu, Pomo and so on, rejected the institution entirely. There appear to have been at least two reasons for this. First, almost everywhere except in the northwest, a man or woman’s money and other wealth was ritually burned at death – and as a result, the institution served as an effective levelling mechanism.
Captives were not slaves, all sources insist they were redeemed quickly, and all killers had to pay compensation; but all this required money. This meant the important men who often instigated wars could profit handsomely from the affair by lending to those unable to pay, and the latter were thus either reduced to debt peons, or retreated to live ignominiously in isolated homesteads in the woods. One might see the intense focus on obtaining money, and resultant puritanism, and also the strong moral opposition to slave-raiding as a result of tensions created by living in this unstable and chaotic buffer zone between the two regions. Elsewhere in California, formal chiefs or headmen existed, and though they wielded no power of compulsion they settled conflicts by raising funds for compensation collectively, and the focus of cultural life was less on the accumulation of property than on organizing annual rites of world renewal.