AA - VV., Complessità e CAS (Lansing, Wiesner, Severi)

Lansing Stephen, CAS-Complex Adaptive Systems
Wiessner Polly, The Vines of complexity
Severi Carlo, Capturing Imagination (Cultural complexity)
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003. 32:183204 doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093440 Copyright c 2003 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved First published online as a Review in Advance on June 4, 2003
COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

J. Stephen Lansing
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003.32:183-204. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by CAPES on 09/15/08. For personal use only.
Department of Anthropology, 221 Haury Bldg., University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0030; external faculty, Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501; email: jlansing@u.arizona.edu
Key Words complexity, self-organized criticality, adaptive agents, evolutionary game theory I Abstract The study of complex adaptive systems, a subset of nonlinear dynamical systems, has recently become a major focus of interdisciplinary research in the social and natural sciences. Nonlinear systems are ubiquitous; as mathematician Stanislaw Ulam observed, to speak of nonlinear science is like calling zoology the study of nonelephant animals (quoted in Campbell et al. 1985, p. 374). The initial phase of research on nonlinear systems focused on deterministic chaos, but more recent studies have investigated the properties of self-organizing systems or anti-chaos. For mathematicians and physicists, the biggest surprise is that complexity lurks within extremely simple systems. For biologists, it is the idea that natural selection is not the sole source of order in the biological world. In the social sciences, it is suggested that emergencethe idea that complex global patterns with new properties can emerge from local interactionscould have a comparable impact. To illustrate the concept of a complex adaptive system, Holland (1995) offers the example of a woman purchasing a jar of pickled herring on an ordinary day in New York City. She fully expects the herring to be there. But grocery stores do not keep large stocks of all kinds of foods to buffer uctuations; if the daily arrivals were cut off, supplies would last no more than a week or two. How, asks Holland, do cities with millions of inhabitants avoid devastating swings between shortage and glut, year after year, without any form of centralized planning? Invoking Adam Smiths invisible hand of the market does not fully satisfy Holland as a solution because it fails to explain the mechanisms that dampen uctuations. Instead he likens the provisioning of cities to the functioning of immune systems or the interactions of species in ecosystems. Thus for food webs in rainforests to sustain biodiversity, innumerable specic ows of nutrientsequivalent to the jars of pickled herringmust persist in the absence of any form of centralized control. Similarly, an immune system also lacks centralized control and cannot settle into a permanent, xed structure; instead it must be able to adapt to unknown invaders. Yet despite its protean nature, a persons immune system is coherent enough to distinguish oneself from anyone else; it will attack cells from any other human. Holland suggests that immune systems, cities, and ecosystems share certain
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properties that make it useful to consider them as instances of a class of phenomena that he terms complex adaptive systems (CAS) (Holland 1995, pp. 46). The concept of CAS is obviously at a very high level of abstraction. Moreover, it crosscuts the usual categories of anthropological thought, such as culture, nature, and society, and applies only to a rather narrow range of phenomena within them. The insights it offers are essentially mathematical and frequently involve the use of new computational tools. New theoretical ideas about CAS tend to be published initially in physics and mathematics journals; some gradually work their way into biology, the social sciences, and, on occasion, business schools and the popular press. The goal of this review is to provide an introduction to the research that I think may be of most interest to anthropologists. It has two parts: The rst offers a historical overview of the broader intellectual currents shaping research on CAS; and the second surveys recent attempts to apply these ideas to anthropological questions.
INTRODUCTION: THE DIVINE TAPE PLAYER

If we could rewind an imaginary videotape of the history of life on Earth, asked biologist Stephen Jay Gould, how much of what we see around us would still be here? Goulds answer was, very little: [T]he divine tape player holds a million scenarios, each perfectly sensible . . . the slightest early nudge contacts a different groove, and history veers into another plausible channel, diverging continually from its original pathway (Gould 1989, pp. 32021). As a paleontologist, Gould saw the living world in terms of phylogenetic trees, each node or species the unique result of a long chain of random evolutionary events. But, as critics of Gould have pointed out, the history of life on this planet shows many examples of convergent evolution, such as the independent evolution of eyes in many taxa, that would be very surprising if Gould were strictly correct (Depew & Weber 1995, pp. 42427). The divine tape player does not produce exact duplicates of species, but it does generate spectacular examples of convergent evolution like anteaters and pangolins or the marsupial lions and wolves of Australia and Tasmania. At the level of molecular evolution, the phylogenetic history of these species ts Goulds model: African lions and marsupial lions shared a common mammalian ancestor millions of years ago and have been diverging ever since. But the fact that these independent pathways of evolution produced animals that are so similar in morphology and behavior suggests that Gould has captured only part of the story. It seems that random bumps and nudges may be more likely to veer into some grooves than others, producing convergence as well as divergence. A similar paradox involving the relationship of the parts to the whole intrigued Emile Durkheim in his classic study of suicide. On the one hand, Durkheim observed, the causes of particular suicides are almost innite in number . . . one man kills himself in the midst of afuence, another in the lap of poverty; one was unhappy in his home, and another had just ended by divorce a marriage which was making him unhappy (Durkheim 1979[1897], p. 303). He concluded that no
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matter how much a researcher knows about a collection of individuals, it is impossible to predict which of them are likely to kill themselves. Yet the number of Parisians who commit suicide each year is even more stable than the general mortality rate. A process that seems to be governed by chance when viewed at the level of the individual turns out to be strikingly predictable at the level of society as a whole. Among students of complex systems, this phenomenon is known as emergence. Consider a system or aggregate composed of many interacting parts. If the system is sufciently complex, it may not be practical or perhaps even possible to know the details of each local interaction. Moreover, local interactions can produce nonlinear effects that make even simple systems impossible to solve (as Newton discovered in attempting to solve the three-body problem). But if we shift our attention from the causal forces at work on individual elements to the behavior of the system as a whole, global patterns of behavior may become apparent. However, the understanding of global patterns is purchased at a cost: The observer must usually give up the hope of understanding the workings of causation at the level of individual elements. The statistical method, wrote physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1890, involves an abandonment of strict dynamical principles (Vol. 2, p. 253). It is an interesting footnote to the history of the sciences that this discovery occurred in the social sciences and was later borrowed by physicists. Doubtless it would be too brave, writes Porter in The Rise of Statistical Thought, to argue that statistical gas theory only became possible after social statistics accustomed scientic thinkers to the possibility of stable laws of mass phenomena with no dependence on predictability of individual events. Still, the actual history of the kinetic gas theory is fully consistent with such a claim (Porter 1986, p. 114).1 Late in his career, the philosopher Karl Popper argued that this shift from an atomistic and mechanistic ontology to one based on probabilities was among the most signicant intellectual pirouettes in the history of science. The world is no longer a causal machine, wrote Popper in his last book (1990). It now can be seen as a world of propensities, as an unfolding process of realizing possibilities and of unfolding new possibilities (Popper 1990, pp. 1819). In physics, the application
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In retrospect, Durkheims comments on the implications of this point seem remarkably prescient. The key issue is the understanding of chance. If suicides occur for many contradictory reasons, then the overall suicide rate should be governed by chance and uctuate chaotically. As Durkheim noted, this is what would be predicted by the dominant statistical theory of his day, that of Adolphe Qu etelet, who held that the behavior of individuals was governed by the sum total of prior inuences acting on them. Qu etelets theory should accurately predict that the average man would not commit suicide, but it should also predict that the suicide rate should uctuate randomly. To this, Durkheim responded that Qu etelets theory rests on an inaccurate observation. He thought that stability occurs only in the most general manifestations of human activity; but it is equally found in the sporadic manifestations which occur only at rare and isolated points of the social eld (Durkheim 1979[1897], p. 302). Durkheim concludes that suicides are not mere statistical outliers but the outcome of deterministic processes.
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of probability theory to the gas laws and thermodynamics in the nineteenth century was followed by quantum theory in the 1920s, in which the statistical properties of ensembles were pushed down into the very structure of the physical universe. At about the same time, biologists Sewall Wright and R.A. Fisher developed models that depicted natural selection in probabilistic terms. Wright sought to understand what he called switch-and-trigger mechanisms, which could drive evolutionary processes into new trajectories, and in the 1930s developed a model of adaptive landscapes to facilitate visualizing such patterns. In this model, genetic variation is depicted as clouds of points in a multi-dimensional landscape, often drawn in three dimensions with peaks and valleys representing high and low levels of adaptive tness. Wrights adaptive landscapes (or tness landscapes) were used initially to consider the effects of evolutionary forces such as inbreeding (Wright 1932) and genetic drift (Dobzhansky 1937, Mayr & Provine 1980). But recently, complexity theorists have used tness landscapes to pose more general questions. As biologist Stuart Kauffman has written, the tness landscape is a powerful, basic and proper starting point to think about selection (Kauffman 1989, p. 69).
ADAPTIVE LANDSCAPES
In the 1960s Kauffman posed a simple question: Is Darwinian natural selection, alone, responsible for the patterns of order we see in the living world? Nonliving phenomena like snowakes exhibit spontaneous order through a process of self-organization. Might self-organizing processes also play a role in biology? To explore this question, Kauffman used computer simulations as a surrogate for Goulds divine tape player. Although Kauffmans research was originally aimed at understanding evolution at the level of genes, his results suggest that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed (Kauffman 1995). A brief summary of Kauffmans work on adaptive landscapes provides an introduction to some of the methods and perspectives now being used in the study of complex systems. The original Wright-Fisher model of tness landscapes assumes a one-to-one correspondence between individual genes and traits that affect tness. As time goes on, a species can climb the peak of Mount Fitness as progressively tter mutants appear and become dominant. But Kauffman observed that this is an oversimplication. In reality, the adaptive tness of any particular trait is likely to be determined by several genes; these are known as epistatic connections among genes. Moreover, the tness of an organism or species depends upon the others with which it interacts: If frogs develop sticky tongues, ies will do better with slippery feet. Thus evolution depends on many interacting (and sometimes conicting) constraints. But rather than try to analyze the actual epistatic connections in particular instances, Kauffman posed a more general question: What is the relationship between the average connectedness of genes to the ability of organisms to evolve? (Later, Kauffman observed that one can ask analogous questions about the connectedness of rms in an economy or species in an ecosystem).
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To see how Kauffman pursued this question, imagine a collection of N Christmas tree lights. Each bulb has one of two possible states, on or off, and is wired up to K other bulbs. A simple rule tells each bulb what to do. For example, let K = 3, meaning that each bulb is wired to 3 other bulbs.2 From one moment to the next, each bulb decides whether to turn itself on or off in accordance with the state of these neighbors. A typical rule is majority wins, meaning that if 2 or 3 of its neighbors are on, the bulb will itself turn on; otherwise it will turn off. How will such a system behave when the electricity goes on? At rst, Kauffman found that there are two possible patterns of behavior, ordered and disordered. Later, Langton (1990) pointed out that the behavior of the network at the transition point between order and chaos is different enough to be categorized as a third regime. Thus there are three regimes: 1) chaotic: If K is large, the bulbs keep twinkling chaotically as they switch each other on and off; 2) frozen or periodic: If K is small (K = 1), some ip on and off a few times, but most of the array of lights will soon stop twinkling; 3) Complex: If K is around 2, complex patterns appear, in which twinkling islands of stability develop, changing shape at their borders. Kauffman discovered that the overall behavior of such NK networks (where N is the number of elements and K the number of connections per element) is almost entirely dependent on K, rather than the specic rules implemented along the epistatic pathways (like majority wins). Kauffman began these experiments in the days when computers were programmed with punch cards. Changing the order in which the cards were stacked would disrupt ordinary programs. But because he was interested in discovering the average behavior of NK networks, his procedure involved shufing the cards and running the program again, to the consternation of onlookers (Flake 1998, p. 329). His principal result was that a network that is either frozen solid or chaotic cannot transmit information and thus cannot adapt. But as Langton discovered, a complex networkone that is near the edge of chaoscan do both (Langton 1990). The characteristic patterns of behavior of NK networks can be visualized on a Derrida plot (Figure 1). Here we track the behavior of a network of 1600 elements (light bulbs). To set up the experiment, two versions of the network are created that are identical except for the numbers of bulbs that happen to be on or off at the start. The number of elements that differ (e.g., off or on) is called the Hamming distance between the two instances of the network. Along the X axis, the Hamming distance varies from zero (the two versions of the network are identical) to 1 (the networks are completely dissimilar: If a bulb is off in one, it is on in the other). Imagine that power is switched on and bulbs turn each other on and off in both
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Rules are dened by Boolean connections like and and or. The majority wins rule used here to illustrate the concept of NK Boolean networks will not lead to chaos.
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Figure 1 Derrida plot of an NK Boolean network. The Derrida plot above shows the behavior of three NK networks (N = 1600). The plot for each network is created as follows: Consider that the network is initialized to two initial states. The two states are identical except for x nodes that are changed from on to off or vice versa. The horizontal axis of the graph reects x; its unit is termed the Hamming distance and indicates the number of corresponding nodes with opposite values, scaled by dividing by N. At the left of the graph the initial states are identical and are progressively more dissimilar to the right. Each instance of the network is then allowed to proceed forward for two time steps. The vertical axis shows the Hamming distance between the two nal states that result. Several different combinations of initial states are plotted for each initial Hamming distance; each point represents one such trial, and the lines connect the averages of the results. K is indicated for each line. For K = 1, the Hamming distance does not change; two initial states that differ on x nodes lead to two nal states that differ on roughly x nodes as well. However, if K = 2, two initial states that differ by a few nodes will tend to converge into a nearby basin of attraction so that after two time steps their initial dissimilarity is signicantly decreased. Conversely, if K = 5, the system behaves chaotically so that even two fairly similar initial states will rapidly become dissimilar. This gure was created by John Murphy using A. Wuenschs Discrete Dynamics Lab; see Wuensch & Lesser 1992.
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networks, resulting in a new Hamming distance that is plotted on the Y axis. In the extreme case where K = 0, the Hamming distance will not change; no bulb will twinkle. At the other extreme, if K is large, even a small initial difference will trigger cascades of twinkles in both networks that will cause them to diverge, and the Hamming distance will increase.
BASINS OF ATTRACTION
If the reader will bear with me, this simple example can be used to explain many of the key concepts involved in the study of complex adaptive systems. As bulbs turn each other on and off, eventually the entire array of bulbs must reach a state that it has encountered before. Once this has occurred, it will cycle back to that conguration forever. This repetitive cycle is called a state cycle or limit cycle. Sometimes more than one conguration of a network will ow into the same state cycle. Start a network with any of these initial patterns and, after passing through a sequence of states, it will settle into the same state cycle or pattern of twinkling. In the language of dynamical systems, the state cycle is called an attractor and the array of initial states that ow into it a basin of attraction. The more initial states that ow into a given attractor, the larger its basin of attraction. So one can ask questions like, how many attractors exist for a given system and how long are the state cycles? For NK networks, the number of states that are possible is 2N, a hyperastronomical number for all but the smallest networks. But the number of attractors and the size of their basins varies dramatically depending on K. When K = N, the average length of state cycles is 2N, and the number of attractors is also huge, about N/e. Such networks provide a dramatic illustration of the concept of deterministic chaos. Flip one bulb in a K = N network, and the network moves out of one basin of attraction and into another. It will be a very long time indeed before it encounters a state that it has been in before (and thus completes one tour of its attractor). The network is extremely sensitive to perturbations, which instantly change its entire pattern of behavior; thus such networks cannot store information. At the other extreme, when K is small, networks exhibit stable or periodic behavior. They arrive at their tiny attractors at an exponentially fast rate and then become trapped in simple state cycles. Different sections of the network function as isolated subsections or islands. They can store information, but there is no communication between the islands. So networks with lots of connections exhibit chaotic behavior, whereas networks with very sparse connections decompose into an archipelago of isolated subsystems that either stop twinkling or follow simple repetitive patterns. However, when K = 2, very different dynamics occur; these networks are in between the chaotic and stable/periodic regimes. Both the number of attractors and their average length are equal to the square root of N, a small number even when N is large. Thus when K = 2, a network of 1600 light bulbs will settle down and cycle through the square root of 1600 states, a mere 40. Initialize a new K = 2 network, and it will soon nd itself headed for one of a few relatively stable congurations. The network as a whole does not decompose, nor does it become chaotic. But the
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most interesting property of K = 2 networks is their response to perturbation. Flip one bulb in a K = 2 network, and in most cases only a few neighbors will twinkle. But occasionally a perturbation will induce large changes, perhaps moving the network into a new basin of attraction. This explains the Derrida plot for K = 2: Most networks are located in just a few large basins of attraction, so networks tend to converge toward one of a relatively few attractors, and the Hamming distance decreases. These results have dramatic implications for the ability of networks to evolve. To see this, imagine that the N elements are genes and that each one contributes something to the tness of the whole network. To ensure that the model is very general, let tnesses be assigned randomly to all the genes or elements in the array. When K = 0 (meaning that the tness of each gene or element does not depend on any others), the tness landscape shows a single Mount Fuji peak. Start anywhere in this landscape, and you can always nd a neighbor one step away with a higher tness. But as K grows larger there are more and more conicting constraints. As the complexity of the network increases, selection is progressively less able to alter its properties. When K = N, each genes tness contribution depends on all the other genes in the array. This means that the differences in tness between genes is very small, and the adaptive landscape looks like a lot of tiny hills. As Kauffman observes, in sufciently complex systems, selection cannot avoid the order exhibited by most members of the ensemble. Therefore, such order is present not because of selection but despite it (Kauffman 1993, p. 16).
Complex Systems and the Edge of Chaos

Kauffman emphasized the role of selection in bringing living systems to the edge of chaos, a controversial point to which we shall return. But physicist Per Bak and his colleagues have shown that nonliving systems can also exhibit self-organizing properties that may take them to the edge of chaos (Bak & Chen 1991, Bak 1997). Baks examples include phenomena like earthquakes, which are unlike biological systems because no process of adaptation is involved; these are known as complex systems rather than complex adaptive systems. Baks best-known example is a sandpile. If you patiently trickle grains of sand onto a at surface, at rst the sand will simply pile up; but eventually the pile will reach a critical state. At that point, Bak found that the size of the avalanches triggered by dropping another grain of sand follows a power law distribution: The size of avalanches is inversely proportional to their frequency (in other words, there will be many little avalanches, a few medium-sized ones, and on rare occasions a large one). Such a sandpile is at the edge of chaos, analogous to a K = 2 Boolean network (to picture this, it may help to imagine that a K = 0 pile would be at, whereas a K = N pile could be a tall and precarious column with a diameter of one grain). Other researchers have found additional pathways that lead to the edge of chaos. The rst research on this topic was carried out by Langton, who wrote a dissertation (1991) entitled Computation at the Edge of Chaos. Langton studied the behavior of cellular automata (CA), a mathematical concept invented by John von Neumann. More recently,
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mathematician Stephen Wolfram carried out exhaustive computer simulations in an attempt to clarify the dynamics of complex behavior in cellular automata (Wolfram 2002). A simple two-dimensional cellular automata begins with a line of different-colored cells on a grid or lattice. Each cell checks its own color and that of its immediate neighbors and decides on the basis of a rule whether to turn color in the next line of the grid. It is equivalent to a two-dimensional NK model where the K inputs are restricted to the cells closest neighbors on the lattice. Wolfram noticed the existence of four classes of behavior in CA: (I) xed, (II) periodic, (III) chaotic, and (IV) complex. Langton became interested in the relationship between these classes and developed a measure, the lambda parameter, that relates the nature of the rules to the overall behavior of the cellular automata (Figure 2). Tuning the lambda parameter leads through Wolframs classes in the order I-IIIV-III; thus the complex regime (class IV) lies between the periodic and chaotic regimes. This led Langton to propose that class IV behaviors could be associated with a phase transition between order and chaos: the edge of chaos (Langton 1990). The methods used to study complexity in cellular automata differ from those used to investigate NK models. The study of CA usually involves following a single rule on its journey to its attractor, whereas investigating NK networks requires taking statistics on their average patterns of behavior. It is interesting that each of these independent lines of researchBaks sandpiles, Kauffmans NK Boolean nets, and Wolframs Class IV cellular automataprovide intuitive examples of complex behavior near the phase transition between ordered and chaotic regimes (Langtons edge of chaos), but so far there is no satisfactory mathematical denition of complexity.
Figure 2 Langtons classication of cellular automata. The behavior of cellular automata depends on the rules that govern their evolution in time. Some rules will map a cell into a quiescent state. Lambda is the fraction of rules that map to non-quiescent states. Langton found that tuning lambda shows that complex behavior (Wolframs Class IV CA) emerges between classes II and III, at the edge of chaos. See Langton 1990.
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A more controversial issue is Kauffmans suggestion that a selective metadynamics may drive complex adaptive systems toward the edge of chaos. Kauffman has demonstrated how this process could occur with computer simulations, but the idea is not easily reconciled with standard models of multilevel selection in evolutionary biology (for a clear statement of this problem, see Levin 2003). Still, from a mathematical standpoint it is clear that systems that nd themselves in this region of their state space are advantageously situated for adaptation. As Langton showed, the ability of networks to both store and transmit information is optimized at the edge of chaos. Moreover, as Kauffman observed, this is where the adaptive landscape is most favorable for gains in tness. At present, physicists (rather than biologists) remain at the forefront of research on the edge of chaos. Two recent examples are noteworthy: One group of physicists found that the rate of entropy increases at the edge of chaos (Latora et al. 2000), whereas de Oliveira conrmed that the eternal search for new forms, better than the current one, is imperative for evolutionary dynamic systems and is optimized at the edge of chaos (de Oliveria 2001, p. 1). On the other hand, Mitchell & Crutcheld (1993) report experiments with cellular automata that call into question Langtons suggestion that the ability of cellular automata to perform computational tasks is optimized when lambda values are closest to the edge of chaos. Although questions remain, the theoretical analysis of complex systems has already produced some intriguing results. Kauffman calls the study of complex adaptive systems antichaos, because it is concerned with the spontaneous appearance of order in dynamical systems. For mathematicians and physicists, the biggest surprise is that complexity lurks within extremely simple systems. For biologists, it is the idea that natural selection is not the sole source of order in the biological world. As for the social sciences, I suggest that emergencethe idea that complex global patterns with new properties may emerge from local interactionsmay someday have a comparable impact. Because space is limited, here I conclude this introduction to the theory of complex systems and turn to some applications of these ideas in the social and behavioral sciences.
THE CRITIQUE OF EQUILIBRIUM THEORY IN ECOLOGY AND ECONOMICS

In a recent article (1999) in the Annual Review of Anthropology on New Ecology and the Social Sciences, Scoones describes the emergence of a new ecology beginning in the 1970s. The turning point was Mays 1976 paper in Nature on Simple Mathematical Models with Very Complicated Dynamics, which showed that simple nonlinear systems do not necessarily possess simple dynamical properties (p. 459). Subsequently, the mathematical foundations of ecology began to shift away from the study of equilibrium (the balance of nature), using simple differential equations, to the study of nonequilibrium theory, with the techniques of nonlinear analysis (Ferriere & Fox 1995, Levin 1999). Scoones suggests that these
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ideas have so far had little impact on the social sciences and urges a fuller engagement with the issues raised by the new ecological thinking (Scoones 1999, p. 496). Mays paper is now seen as a milestone in the rst phase of nonlinear analysis, the discovery of chaos. Most of the ecological research discussed by Scoones is also concerned with chaotic dynamics and nonequilibrium systems (it should be noted, however, that a good deal of contemporary research in ecology makes little use of nonlinear methods). More recently, the study of spontaneous order and selforganizing properties in ecosystems has become a major new theme of research. As Levin (2003, p. 3) observes in a recent review article on the mathematics of complex adaptive systems, studying antichaos involves understanding how cooperation, coalitions and networks of interaction emerge from individual behaviors and feed back to inuence those behaviors. Although nonlinear approaches have spread to many areas of ecological research, the aspects that may be of greatest interest to anthropologists have to do with the emergent properties of social and behavioral systems. Here one often encounters broad theoretical pronouncements, such as Schanks contention that most animal social systems are self-organizing (Schank 1998, p. 1). But specic applications of nonlinear models to animal behavior have also begun to appear. For example, Bonabeau has investigated the foraging behavior of various species of ants and concludes that they are a clear example of adaptation to the edge of chaos (Bonabeau 1997, p. 29). The ants use multiple systems for communication and for recruiting foragers to newly discovered food sources. Species at the edge of chaos, like Tetramorium caespitum, can adaptively switch to newly discovered food sources if they are of higher quality, whereas other species do not take advantage of the higher-quality food until the rst source is exhausted. Bonabeaus mathematical model shows how the global decisionmaking processes of the ants emerge from the local interactions between individual foragers (Bonabeau 1997). Complexity theory is also beginning to have a similar impact on economics: a shift from equilibrium models constructed with differential equations to nonlinear dynamics, as researchers recognize that economies, like ecosystems, may never settle down into an equilibrium. A clear and readable account of this change in perspective is provided by Arthur in his article (1999) on Complexity and the Economy. Arthur argues that complexity economics is not a temporary adjunct to static economic theory, but theory at a more general, out-of-equilibrium level. The approach is making itself felt in every area of economics: game theory, the theory of money and nance, learning in the economy, economic history, the evolution of trading networks, the stability of the economy, and political economy (Arthur 1999, p. 109; see also Arthur et al. 1997). Kauffman draws explicit parallels between biological and economic systems: [T]he modern corporation is a collectively self-sustaining structure of roles and obligations that lives in an economic world, exchanges signals and stuffs, and survives or dies in ways at least loosely analogous to those of E. coli . . . . Both E. coli and IBM coevolve in their respective worlds (Kauffman 1995, p. 300). Economists have followed up on this idea by investigating the web structure of economies, as, for example, in
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Kauffman and Scheinkmans analysis of the relationship between the diversity of sectors and rate of economic growth in cities (Kauffman 1995, p. 295). Today the study of nonequilibrium economics is well under way, for example, in the simulation of stock markets both real and imaginary. The study of the global properties of these economies has been accompanied by research on the behavior of economic actors. Economist Sam Bowles and his colleagues have begun to work with anthropologists to investigate, as an empirical question, how social actors make decisions in game-theoretical or economic contexts (Bowles & Gintis 2002). Based on these results, they propose to supplement Homo economicus with a larger and more diverse family of man. Research in economics on complexity thus proceeds at two levels: the characteristics of individual social actors and the global dynamics of economies or societies. This research draws heavily on mathematical models of nonlinear systems; investigators keep an eye out for powerlaw distributions of events (such as the growth of rms or the frequency of stock market events) that may signal a system near the edge of chaos (Scheinkman & Woodford 1994).
COOPERATION AND THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

Common to all studies on complexity, writes Arthur, are systems with multiple elements adapting or reacting to the patterns these elements create (Arthur 1999, p. 107). However, what if the elements are not cells or light bulbs but agents capable of reacting with new strategies or foresight to the patterns they have helped to create? As Arthur observes, this adds a layer of complication not experienced in the natural sciences, and much of the current research by social scientists on complex adaptive systems is concerned with precisely this question. One consequence has been to breathe new life into the eld of game theory. Like many anthropologists, as a graduate student I had little interest in game theory because it seemed to embody implausible assumptions about human nature, what Marshall Sahlins calls the common average social science wisdom. But the complexity approach has led to a major shift in perspective, from static models of rational choice to the evolution of strategies over time, and from local interactions to their global effects. Perhaps the most active area of research in this eld is concerned with the broad subject of social cooperation, which spans topics ranging from the evolution of cooperation in social animals to the human management of natural resources. Here I briey trace the outlines of this shift from static to dynamic models of the emergence of cooperation. The obvious place to begin is with Axelrods famous study of the emergence of cooperation between groups of front-line soldiers who faced each other across the trenches of France in World War One (Axelrod 1984). Axelrod wondered how cooperation could develop between groups of men who could not converse and were in fact trying to kill each other. His approach was to try to identify the strategic choices each group faced in dealing with their opponents across No Mans Land.
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Thus a vigorous assault at an unexpected time might lead to a victory, with many enemy dead. But the same option was also available to the enemy. Alternatively, if each group only pretended to attack and made their artillery re completely predictable, their opponents would have time to take cover. If both sides adopted this strategy, neither side would suffer casualties. In terms of the available options, although a successful attack was deemed the best outcome, to be a victim of such an attack was clearly the worst, while live and let live falls somewhere in between. But for a live and let live strategy to work, each side must trust the other. Yet such informal truces broke out repeatedly along the trenches and became a major headache for the high command on both sides. Axelrod suggested that the underlying dynamics of the live and let live system could be represented as a game. The advantage to such formalization is that it becomes possible to compare the wartime case with other unlikely instances of spontaneous cooperation to see if similar processes are involved. The particular game is called the Prisoners Dilemma. As the story goes, two prisoners are each given the choice of giving evidence against the other and so reducing their own sentence. The dilemma arises because if neither defects on the other, the police can convict them both only on a lesser charge. But if one defects (by giving evidence to the police), he goes free, whereas the other goes to jail for a long time. If both defect, both will receive the maximum penalty. These choices and their respective payoffs may be represented in a table (Table 1). Here the rewards are scaled from zero (the worst) to 5 (the best). Mathematician Karl Sigmund suggests that the game becomes more interesting if we think of these payoffs as gold bars, not measly little numbers (Sigmund 1993). In Table 1, the numbers in the boxes refer to the payoffs: The rst number is the payoff for Player 1 and the second for Player 2. So if Player 1 cooperates and so does Player 2, the payoff for each is 3, as shown in the top left box. But if Player 1 cooperates and Player 2 defects (top right box), Player 1 receives the suckers payoff of zero, whereas the unscrupulous Player 2 reaps the maximum reward: 5 gold bars (or a ticket out of jail in the original anecdote). The problem is that the optimal strategies for each player create the worst possible joint outcome. Thus, if the other player defects, you are better off defecting (you get one bar instead of none). If the other player cooperates, you are still better off defecting (you get ve bars, he gets none). So, cold logic dictates that the best strategy is always to defect. But since the same logic holds for the other player, the outcome is mutual defection, and everyone loses. The chief advantage to dening the problem in this way (as a simple game) is that it can help to reveal the essence of the problem. Indeed one can see that Garrett Hardins tragedy of the commons
TABLE 1 The Prisoners Dilemma Player 2: Cooperate Player 1: Cooperate Player 1: Defect 3,3 5,0 Player 2: Defect 0,5 1,1
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is another instance of exactly the same game (Hardin 1968, 1998). All shermen would be better off if they exercised voluntary restraint and did not take too many sh. But in such a situation, an unscrupulous sherman who decides to take more sh will reap greater rewards than the suckers who take only their share, unless there is a common property management system in place (see Agrawal 2003, this volume). Axelrod suggested that the tragedy of mutual defection can be avoided only if players understand themselves to be in a situation where continuing cooperation can pay off, because the circumstances of the game will recur. In other words, it is worthwhile to cooperate with me today provided I am in a position to repay you by cooperating tomorrow. In the trenches of World War I, Axelrod relates an anecdote in which the artillery from the German side opened up at an unexpected time and killed some British soldiers, thus violating the implicit agreement. Some Germans came out under a ag of truce to apologize and promise that the mistake would not happen again. Subsequent studies emphasized the wide applicability of the Prisoners Dilemma. For example, sociologists compared the behavior of drivers in large cities versus small towns and villages. Shaking ones st at other drivers, honking the horn, and other acts of rudeness are more frequent in big city trafc, perhaps because drivers in cities can assume that they are anonymous. Similarly, evolutionary biologists have suggested that cooperation (reciprocal altruism) occurs only among social species that are capable of recognizing other individuals and remembering whether they cooperated on previous occasions. Examples include vampire bats, dolphins, elephants, primates and most especially humans (summarized in Sigmund 1993). Humans turn out to be remarkably good at predicting whether others will cooperate. This was shown in an ingenious experiment: Economist R.H. Frank found that if a group of strangers are asked to play the Prisoners Dilemma game, their ability to predict who will cooperate (and who will not) improves dramatically if they are given just 30 min to socialize with the other players before the game begins (Frank 1988). In the original game, rational choice leads to ruin. But if the game continues over time, intuitively it seems possible for cooperation to emerge, as these examples suggest. Axelrod and other researchers accordingly reformulated the game to allow simulated agents to play a series of games with one another, treating their strategies and their memory of the behavior of other players as variables (Axelrod 1997). Because the success of particular strategies is frequency-dependent, the entire game can be treated as a dynamical system evolving over time, with global characteristics that emerge from the local interactions of players and strategies. Under these circumstances, Axelrod found that cooperation would emerge under a wide range of conditions. Subsequently, physicist Kristian Lindgren embedded game-playing agents on a lattice, adding greater exibility by making memory length an evolutionary variable. Over tens of thousands of generations, he observed the emergence of spatial patterns that resemble evolutionary processes and that help to clarify preconditions for the emergence of cooperation and competition (Lindgren 1994).
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More recently, mathematician Karl Sigmund has developed simulations of games in which players remember encounters they have observed; here cooperation develops very quickly (Sigmund 1993, Nowak & Sigmund 1998). Such simulation results have inspired behavioral ecologists to reexamine biological systems. For example Milinski has studied stickleback sh, which enjoy a well-earned reputation for keeping abreast of the latest trends in animal behavior. According to Milinski, cooperation in predator inspection by the sticklebacks follows the dynamics of the iterated Prisoners Dilemma (cited in Sigmund 1993, p. 201). The results of these simulations have also been used to model problems in political science and economics (Axelrod 1997). But cooperation is by no means the only emergent property investigated by social simulations. Philosopher Brian Skyrms has studied the evolution of the social contract by modeling it as a problem in the evolution of dynamical systems. His most ambitious models tackle such large questions as the evolution of justice, linguistic meaning, and logical inference. Skyrms nds that the typical case is one in which there is not a unique preordained result, but rather a profusion of possible equilibrium outcomes. The theory predicts what anthropologists have always knownthat many alternative styles of social life are possible (1996, p. 81). But this may be a bit too modest. With respect to the evolution of meaning, for example, Skyrms shows that evolutionary processes provide a plausible answer to the fundamental question, How do the arbitrary symbols of language become associated with the elements of reality they denote? (Skyrms 1996, p. 81).
COMPLEX SYSTEMS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

There have been several notable studies by anthropologists investigating nonlinear dynamics, such as Parks investigation of the relationship between chaos in ood-recession agriculture and the emergence of social classes (Park 1992). But adaptive agent models have been the main point of entry of complex systems theory into anthropology, beginning with Gumermans pioneering collaboration with physicist Murray Gell-Mann (Gumerman & Gell-Mann 1994). Gumerman became interested in Axtell and Epsteins Sugarscape, a simulation model developed to study how sociocultural phenomena like trade, warfare, and class structures can arise from simple interactions of adaptive agents. Epstein & Axtell wrote a book about their Sugarscape simulations that provides an excellent overview of research on articial societies (Epstein & Axtell 1996; for my own critique of this eld see Lansing 2002). In Sugarscape, the environment is very simple, consisting of the agents themselves plus some idealized resources, like sugar and spice. Gumerman and his collaborators wondered if more realistic environments could be simulated, with heterogeneous agents and landscapes dened by real archaeological data, observing that while potentially powerful, agent-based models in archaeology remain unveried until they are evaluated against real-world cases. The degree of t between a model and real-world situation allows the models validity to be assessed (Dean et al. 2000, p. 180). They further observe that the
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explanatory power of mathematical models may be greatest when they fail because such failures may expose where the researchers underlying conceptual model or explanation is awed. Gumerman & Dean (Dean et al. 2000) worked with Epstein and Axtell to apply the techniques developed for Sugarscape to create an agent-based model of the Anasazi society of Long House Valley in northeastern Arizona from 1800 B.C. to A.D. 1300. Here, the simple lattice environment of Sugarscape is replaced by paleoenvironmental data on a 96-km2 physical landscape. The environment of Articial Anasazi is populated with human households so that spatiotemporal patterns of settlement formation and household production can be simulated and compared with the archaeological record. A similar approach was developed by Kohler (Kohler & Gumerman 2000) to model human settlements in Mesa Verde circa A.D. 9001300. Such models enable their creators to test their intuitions about the complex nonlinear processes involved in human-environmental interactions. As Kohler observes, agent-based approaches admit an important role for history and contingency (and) can also, in principle, accommodate models that invoke heterogeneity among agents, or which drive social change through shifting coalitions of agents, argued by many (e.g., Brumel 1992) to be a critical social dynamic (Kohler & Gumerman 2000, p. 14). One of the strengths of this type of simulation modeling is that it enables researchers to subject trial explanations for sociocultural phenomena to a rigorous test. Of course this has always been the main justication for mathematical models; what is new about the adaptive agent approach is their ability to capture nonlinear effects that would otherwise be out of reach. But in my view, a more important development is the revelation, foreshadowed by theoretical work on complex adaptive systems, that social institutions can emerge from the bottom up as a result of feedback processes linking social actors to their environments (as Kohler & Gumerman observe in their recent volume). Such institutions might look very different from those that social scientists normally study; they might even be invisible. Recently my colleagues and I have suggested that the water temple networks with which Balinese farmers manage their centuries-old irrigation systems and rice terraces are a real-world example of a complex adaptive system, whose dynamics resemble those of Lovelocks Daisyworld (Lovelock 1992, Lansing et al. 1998, Lenton & Lovelock 2000). For decades, both social scientists and engineers have marveled at the success of the Balinese in managing complex irrigation systems involving hundreds of villages. But the question of how this was achieved remained mysterious. We developed a simple game-theory formulation of the choices that Balinese farmers face when they make decisions about cooperation in water management, and we veried that this game captured the farmers views in questionnaires administered to farmers from 15 different irrigation societies. A simulation model of 200 communities was constructed to explore the effects on rice terrace ecology at the watershed scale. We found that even though local communities do not consciously attempt to create an optimal pattern of
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staggered cropping schedules for entire watersheds . . . the actual patterns [we] have observed in the eld bear a very close resemblance to computer simulations of optimal solutions (Lansing 2000, p. 313). In subsequent experiments, we pursued the kinds of questions Kauffman posed in The Origins of Order, such as the relationship between the structure of connections between farming communities (subaks) and the ability of the entire collection of subaks to self-organize (Lansing et al. 1998). In the Balinese case, global control of terrace ecology emerges as local actors strike a balance between two opposing constraints: water stress from inadequate irrigation ow and damage from rice pests such as rats and insects. In our computer model, the solution involves nding the right scale of reproductive synchrony, a solution that emerges from innumerable local interactions. This system was deliberately disrupted by agricultural planners during the Green Revolution in the 1970s. For planners unfamiliar with the notion of self-organizing systems, the relationship between watershed-scale synchrony, pest control, and irrigation management was obscure. Our simulation models helped to clarify the functional role of water temples, and, partly as a consequence, the Asian Development Bank dropped its opposition to the bottom-up control methods of the subaks, noting that the cost of the lack of appreciation of the merits of the traditional regime has been high (Lansing 1991, pp. 12425). An intriguing parallel to the Balinese example has recently been proposed by ecologist Lisa Curran (1999). Forty years ago Borneo was covered with the worlds oldest and most diverse tropical forests. Curran observes that during the El Ni no Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the dominant canopy timber trees (Dipterocarpaceae) of the lowland forests synchronize seed production and seedling recruitment. As in the Balinese case, reproductive success involves countless locallevel trade-offs, in this case between competition among seedlings versus predator satiation. The outcome of these trade-offs is global-scale synchronized reproductive cycles. But forest management policies have failed to take into account this vast self-organizing system (Curran et al. 1999). As Curran explains, With increasing forest conversion and fragmentation, ENSO, the great forest regenerator, has become a destructive regional phenomenon, triggering droughts and wildres with increasing frequency and intensity, disrupting dipterocarp fruiting, wildlife and rural livelihoods (p. 2188). As a consequence, the lowland tropical forests of Borneo are threatened with imminent ecological collapse (L.M. Curran, personal communication). These examples serve to highlight two points emphasized by Holland. The rst point is that recognizing complex adaptive systems involves a shift in perception; thus the most fruitful strategy may be to make cross-disciplinary comparisons in hopes of extracting common characteristics. Hollands second point is to echo the warning sounded by many ecologists: We, as humans, have become so numerous that we perforce extensively modify ecological interactions, with only vague ideas of longer-range effects (Holland 1995, pp. 4, 6). Ecologists are beginning to try to quantify these effects; for example, Field recently calculated the fraction of
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the earths total biological productivity that is appropriated by Homo sapiens at nearly 40% and rising fast (Field 2001). Understanding this phenomenon is an intrinsically interdisciplinary problem, as Holland emphasizes; yet so far it has received far less attention from anthropologists than ecologists (Levin 1999, Sol e & Manrubia 1995, Holling 2001, Lenton & Lovelock 2000).
CRITIQUES, REVIEWS, AND RESOURCES

There have been several recent critiques of the eld of articial societies. Thus Smith wrote in the New York Review of Books that he has a general feeling of unease when contemplating complex systems dynamics. Its devotees are practising fact-free science. A fact for them is, at best, the outcome of a computer simulation; it is rarely a fact about the world (Smith 1995, p. 30). Science writer John Horgan cautions that as the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out, prediction is our best means of distinguishing science from pseudo-science . . . . The history of 20th-century science should also give complexologists pause. Complexity is simply the latest in a long line of highly mathematical theories of almost everything that have gripped the imaginations of scientists in this century (Horgan 1995, p. 104). (Here, Horgan appears to be mostly concerned with the very general theories of emergence developed by Stuart Kauffman and Per Bak, among others.) A broader critique was recently published by an anthropologist, Stefan Helmreich, who offers an ethnographic account of the researchers working at the Santa Fe Institute in the mid-1990s. In Silicon Second Nature (1998), Helmreich argues that articial-societies models reect the unconscious cultural assumptions and social prejudices of their creators: Because Articial Life scientists tend to see themselves as masculine gods of their cyberspace creations, as digital Darwins exploring frontiers lled with primitive creatures, their programs reect prevalent representations of gender, kinship, and race and repeat origin stories most familiar from mythical and religious narratives (p. 95). For example, Helmreich describes Hollands genetic algorithms as reecting a heterosexual bias: There are a number of ways we might understand the exchange of bits between strings, but the metaphor of productive heterosex is gleefully emphasized by most authors (p. 146). Thus for Helmreich, simulation models are like Rorschach tests, revealing the researchers cultural background and psychological idiosyncrasies. All statements, especially theoretical pronouncements, are taken not as statements about the world but as evidence about the authors beliefs and mode of thought. That many Articial Life practitioners are white men who grew up reading cowboy science ction, observes Helmreich, is not trivial (p. 95). Simulation models may also be dangerous (as Helmreich suggests with reference to my own work), urging that the use and abuse of computer simulations bears watchingespecially in situations where there is a notable power differential between those putting together the simulation and those whose lives are the subjects and objects of these
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simulations (Helmreich 1999; for my response, see Lansing 2000 and Lansing et al. 2001). Readers interested in an overview of the eld cannot do better than Kohler & Gumermans (2000) volume, which contains review essays by archaeologists Kohler and Henry Wright, as well as Modeling Sociality: the View from Europe by sociologist Nigel Gilbert (2000). There are a large number of popular accounts of research on chaos and complexity; my favorites are Gleicks (1987) Chaos and Waldrops (1992) Complexity (though both are rather out of date). More substantial overviews include Langton 1994, Flake 1998, Hofbauer & Sigmund 1988, Depew & Weber 1995, Lansing 2002, and Kauffman 1993. A useful weekly digest of publications pertaining to complexity is available at http://www.comdig.org, and the working papers of the Santa Fe Institute are available for the asking at http://www.santafe.edu. Simulation of cellular automata, random Boolean networks, and Derrida plots can be accomplished using free software created by Andrew Wuensch and is available at http://www.santafe.edu/wuensch/ddlab.html. Anthropologists may also be interested in mathematical models of small-world networks (Watts 1999, Watts & Strogatz 1998), which investigate the topological properties of social and ecological networks.
CONCLUSION
This chapter is already too long, so I will conclude with a single observation. So far, only a handful of anthropologists have taken an interest in complex systems. Yet much contemporary research on complex adaptive systems is concerned with questions that have traditionally formed the subject matter of anthropology. As the distinguished mathematical biologist Simon Levin observed in a review of current research, there is fundamental interest in the evolution of social norms, or of language, and how such group properties emerge from and feed back to inuence individual behavior . . . . [T]he potential payoffs are enormous and the mathematical challenges irresistably seductive (2003, p. 10). There seems little doubt that such questions will be pursued, if not by anthropologists then by our colleagues. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Christopher Langton, Lisa Curran, George Gumerman, James Kremer, Joseph Watkins, Th er` ese de Vet, and John Murphy for helpful comments. Research on complex systems in Bali was supported by grants from the Anthropology and Biocomplexity programs of the National Science Foundation. The Santa Fe Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the University of Arizona provided opportunities for reection and discussions with colleagues. The views expressed here, however, are entirely my own.
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The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 2, April 2002
2002 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2002/4302-0002$3.50
The Vines of Complexity

Egalitarian Structures and the Institutionalization of Inequality among the Enga1 by Polly Wiessner
The initial stages of the institutionalization of hierarchical social inequalities remain poorly understood. Recent models have added important perspectives to adaptationist approaches by centering on the agency of aggrandizers who alter egalitarian institutions to suit their own ends through debt, coercion, or marginalization. However, such approaches often fail to take the recursive interaction between agents and egalitarian structure seriously, regarding egalitarian structures as the products of simplicity or blank slates on which aggrandizers can make their marks. The approach here, drawing on insights from the work of Douglass North, views egalitarian structures as complex institutions which, together with their accompanying ideologies, have arisen to reduce the transaction costs of exchange in small-scale societies. It will be argued that egalitarian structures and the coalitions that maintain them vary as greatly in conguration, scope, and nature as do hierarchical structures of power, presenting a variety of obstacles on the path to institutionalized inequality. Data from the precolonial historical traditions of 110 Enga tribes, covering a time span of some 250 years in which vast exchange networks developed and hierarchical inequalities began to be institutionalized, will be used to examine (1) the nature of egalitarian structures and coalitions in Enga at the outset, (2) how these steered the perceptions, motivations, and strategies of agents, and (3) the outcomes of different courses of action. By exploring egalitarian structures in this way it should be possible to depart from neoevolutionary models of political evolution without abandoning a more encompassing theoretical framework. p o l l y w i e s s n e r is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-0060, U.S.A. [wiessner@soft-link.com]). Born in 1947, she was educated at Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1969) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1977). She was a research associate of the Institute for Human Ethology in the Max Planck Society from 1981 to 1996 and has done eldwork among the !Kung San (Ju/hoansi) and among the Enga of Papua New Guinea. Her publications include (with A. Tumu) Historical Vines: Enga Networks of Exchange, Ritual, and Warfare in Papua New Guinea (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998) and (with Wulf Schiefenho vel) the edited volume Food and the Status Quest (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996) and a number of articles on reciprocity, exchange, and style in artifacts among the !Kung San. The present paper was accepted 17 viii 01. 1. I thank Akii Tumu and Nitze Pupu for their collaboration over more than a decade. Funding for this project was provided by the Forschungsstelle fu r Humanethologie in the Max Planck Society and the Enga Provincial Government. Special thanks go to the hun-
Perhaps the dimmest areas that remain in studies of political evolution are the initial stages in which inequalities beyond those of age, ability, and gender emerged, grew, and became institutionalized. Engendered in a climate in which social and material discretion was the rule, the onset and dynamics of the institutionalized inequality remain concealed by sparse archaeological evidence. What is apparent, however, is that the process was often protracted and punctuated by booms and crashes (Bender 1990, Drennan 1991, Earle 1997, Kirch 1991, Paynter 1989). The emergence of institutionalized inequality is considered to be a threshold in political evolution when deeply rooted orientations of small-scale societies were overcome, paving the way for the development of complex polities (Earle 1997, Feinman 1995, Flannery 1972, Hayden 1995, Roscoe 1993, Upham 1990). When seen in the longer-term perspective of human evolution, however, inequality is more accurately portrayed as reemerging. Hierarchy characterizes societies of our closest nonhuman primate ancestors (Knauft 1991, Kummer 1971) and seems to be deeply rooted in human behavior (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1974, 1989; Salter 1995; Tiger and Fox 1971).2 Therefore it is likely that societies in which individuals held equal rights to resources and status rst developed in the Lower or Middle Paleolithic. Explanations for the origin of egalitarianism are still highly hypothetical (Boehm 1999a, Hawkes 2000, Knauft 1991). However, egalitarianism appears to have provided the context for the evolution of more elaborate forms of cooperation, including networks of mutual support based on kinship that extended far outside the local group (Ambrose 1998, Gamble 1998, McBrearty and Brooks 2000, Wiessner 1998). New levels of cooperation fostered by egalitarian relations provided powerful tools for the enterprising to work with, on the one hand, and rigid constraints governing competition, on the other. Several approaches have been employed to address the reemergence of inequality and its subsequent institutionalization into systems with hierarchical organization, hereditary position, and control by the elite over institutions that extend beyond the boundaries of the local group (Brumel 1994, Earle 1987, Hayden 1995, Paynter 1989, Roscoe 1993). Arnold (1993:80) has divided these approaches into two groups according to whether or not individuals are portrayed as active agents of political change. The rst, called adaptationist or managerial models (Brumel and Earle 1987), contend that change is spurred by conditions that affect the whole cultural system. These may come either from without, for example, population pressure, resource stress, drought, or warfare (Carneiro 1970, Cohen 1985, Johnson and Earle 1987, Keeley 1988, Webster 1975, Wittfogel 1957, Wright and Johnson 1975), or from within, for exdreds of Enga who gave us their time and their knowledge. I am also grateful to CA referees and John Clark, who provided substantive criticism on earlier drafts of this paper. 2. Insightful in this context is Clastress (1977:34) remark that culture apprehends power as the very resurgence of nature.
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234 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 2, April 2002
ample, the need for redistribution of resources within or between societies (Fried 1960, 1967; Halstead and OShea 1982; Isbell 1978; Polanyi 1944; Rathje 1972; Sahlins 1958; Service 1958). Inequalities arise out of the corresponding need for managers to solve such problems. The degree of functionalism in adaptationist models and the motivations attributed to managers vary considerably. Perhaps their strongest point for the emergence of hierarchical inequality is that the seeds of inequality can take root only when the population stands to gain real benets from stronger leadership. They suffer, however, from an inability to account for internally generated change, human agency (Brumel 1992, Cowgill 1975), and the impact of preexisting cultural orientations. Moreover, empirical evidence from numerous studies indicates that inequality rst appears under conditions of resource abundance, not stress (Hayden 1995, Price and Brown 1985, Price and Feinman 1995, Paynter 1989). Redistribution by elites does little to manage resources of a region in such a way as to benet a wide segment of the population (Earle 1977, Hayden and Gargett 1990, Peebles and Kus 1977). In response, the focus has shifted to explanations which center on human agencythe vying of aggrandizers for prestige and wealth. Demographic and environmental factors take second place as facilitating or constraining the designs of actors. Agency approaches are founded on the premise that every society has ambitious individuals who provide a motor for change. Portrayals of the strategies chosen by aggrandizers and their intentionality differ. Hayden (1995), Boone (1992), Earle (1997), Arnold (1993, 1995), and others, drawing on cultural ecology, evolutionary ecology, and Marxism, respectively, propose that aggrandizers strive to gain control of strategic resources or manipulate the production of others through debt and contract, coercion, marginalization, or exploitation made possible by restricted mobility. Though power comes from several sources, primacy rests in material processes (Earle 1997:12). Materialist stances depict aggrandizers as individuals who, through the alchemy of ambition, are able to manipulate others to achieve a standard outcomepreferential access to resources and the domination of others. Quantitative economic gains are applied to bring about alterations in the social order, which are then legitimized through ideology. Clark and Blake (1994:17), drawing on practice theory (Bourdieu 1977, Giddens 1979, Ortner 1984), see the situation somewhat differently and add important considerations to agency approaches. They argue that institutionalized inequality is the unintended outcome of self-interested competition among political actors vying for prestige by employing tactics that conform to the self-interests of their followers. Competition over physical resources is not an end in itself, though controls of land, labor, and resources may occur in the course of its pursuit. Agency approaches raise important questions: Under what conditions do people in an egalitarian society allow others to take control? Are they pleased or squeezed to do so? Does primacy really rest in material processes?
Despite their substantial contributions, agency approaches have seldom investigated the recursive interaction between structure and agency, in part because they consider egalitarianism not as structure but as a slate of simplicity on which aggrandizers can leave their mark. By structure I mean institutionsthe humanly and historically devised rules of the game (North 1990)and ideology, values and beliefs that determine peoples goals and theories of how the world works (Ensminger 1992:168). The omission of structure from the equation has obscured fundamental dynamics. For example, adaptationist models see context-dependency as the mother of new cultural structures, the impact of the old presumably disintegrating under demographic or ecological pressures. The approaches of Arnold (1993), Hayden (1995), and Boone (1992) do not seriously question whether it is possible or desirable to indebt or marginalize when kinship and egalitarian ethics reign and dependence on egalitarian institutions is high. And, once aggrandizers get a foot in the door, can they secure incremental gains, or does the structure strike back as people employ sanctions to topple them and defeat hierarchy (Mitchell 1988)? Or, as Clastres (1977:32) has proposed, if the structure of egalitarian societies lies in the exchange of women, goods, and words, then the power, as the rejection of reciprocity, is essentially the rejection of society itself and meets with strong resistance. Clark and Blakes (1994) model is sensitive to structure, but in being so it tends to collapse structure into the ends and interests of the actors and their followers, making it difcult to grasp the tension between agency and structure. Without such tension there is no motion, and the failures in social reproduction that cause the booms and crashes seen in the archaeological record are obscured. Here I will use ethnohistorical data from the Enga of highland Papua New Guinea to explore the interaction between structure and agency at the point in their political evolution when hierarchical inequalities emerged and began to be institutionalized. The data come from the historical traditions of 110 tribes recording events of signicance starting some 250400 years ago, shortly before sweet potato vines were introduced to Enga, and continuing well beyond rst contact with Europeans in the 1930s (Wiessner and Tumu 1998). The sweet potato released constraints on production, allowed a substantial surplus to be produced in pigs, and permitted rapid demographic and economic growth (Watson 1965a, b, 1977). During the period considered, inequalities grew signicantly as vast exchange networks were constructed under the initiatives of enterprising men. The greatest of these, the Tee cycle, involved some 40,000 participants by the time of rst contact. Enga historical traditions detail the personalities of some of the Tee cycle managers involved and their dreams, strategies, victories, and failures as they jockeyed to construct and master these networks in the pursuit of name, fame, and wealth. The thrust of my argument will be that egalitarianism is not the product of organizational simplicity or traditionalism, not the tabula rasa for human affairs
w i e s s n e r The Vines of Complexity F 235
(Boehm 1999a, Trigger 1990) on which aggrandizers impress their designs. Rather, egalitarianism is the outcome of complex institutions and ideologies created and maintained by cultural means which empower a coalition of the weaker to curb the strong (see also Cashdan 1980, Clastres 1977, Kelly 1993).3 Egalitarian coalitions vary as greatly in conguration, composition, scope, and nature as hierarchical power structures, producing a wide variety of paths to and outcomes of the institutionalization of inequality in different societies.
Agents and Egalitarian Institutions

As a point of departure for understanding institutions, I will draw on some insights from the work of Douglass North (1990, n.d.). Institutions, following North (1990: 3), are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction. Exchange, whether social, economic, or political, is costly because of the many uncertainties of human interaction; institutions exist to reduce the uncertainties that generate transaction costs. In doing so they facilitate cooperation and trust. Transaction costs are threefold: assessing value, protecting rights, and enforcing agreements. Institutions, as the rules of the game, contribute to setting the incentive structure of a society by determining opportunities that are open to individuals and inuencing evaluations of costs and benets. They vary widely in their efciency and consequences for economic performance. Institutions structure transaction costs and, together with technology, the feasibility of engaging in economic activity. What may appear as advantageous exchange may not pay off if transaction costs are too high. Because past, present, and future are connected by the continuity of a societys institutions, history matterstodays and tomorrows decisions are shaped by institutions of the past (1990:vii). North (1990) proposes that in traditional societies transaction costs are low because of repeated interaction and relatively complete information (see also Ensminger 1992:25), but I disagree.4 In nonmarket economies in which kin-based exchange systems play an important role in reducing risk Wiessner (1982, 1996), the goal of exchange is to be covered during times of need. In this context the social and the economic are closely intertwined (Mauss 1925), and it is undesirable for returns to be stipulated as to time, quantity, or quality (Sahlins 1972). The most valuable information in such exchanges is the details of the partnerwhat he or she has to offer and will offer over the long run. This information is very costly to obtain. Moreover, protection is tricky when transgressors are close kin and enforcement difcult when people vote with their feet to avoid conict. In
3. Some linguistic studies suggest that egalitarian societies may have characteristic strategies of verbal interaction (Sugawara 1997). 4. See also Cashdan (1990), Kosse (1990), Flannery (1972), and Johnson (1982) for discussions of the complexities of information ow in simple societies.
response to high transaction costs, many small-scale societies provide a set of egalitarian institutions which foster trust and make interactions more predictable. Egalitarian institutions and ideologies do much to reduce transactions costs in exchange. First, they standardize important information about biological and ctive kin by stipulating that kin hold equal rights to resources and status. These rights are not compromised if one party is unable to reciprocate over long periods; inability to reciprocate does not incur debt. Second, the costs of kinship dues are lowered and trust is fostered in egalitarian settings because assistance received cannot be used to build position and exploit. Those who prosper from the help of others must similarly assist them, limiting competition that disrupts cooperative social relationships. Third, equality facilitates the mobility that is so necessary to maintain broad networks of mutual assistancepeople move between groups more easily when dominance and exploitation are not issues (Wiessner 1996:18687). Egalitarian institutions are effective for reducing transaction costs, but they are not maximally efcient. They constrain competition and emphasize redistributive activities, curtailing individual incentive and accumulation of material capital. Egalitarian norms and relations must be constantly enforced against aggrandizers and free riders. However, because breaches threaten all coalition members, enforcement is shared, lowering its costs for individuals (Boehm 1993, 1999a; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1982; Sober and Wilson 1998). The initial response to transgressions may be leveling during everyday talk (Wiessner 1981), the spice of life in egalitarian societies, which brings big shots and slackers into line without threatening dyadic relationships. If milder sanctions go unheeded, criticism may escalate to such measures as witchcraft or ostracism, with the offender departing either permanently or until feelings cool. Not all efforts to excel are judged as threateningif individual achievements benet others (for example, mediation, hunting, sharing, or defense) the doer may elicit respect for efforts to excel, for example, priority in having his or her opinion heard, praise rather than criticism for marrying more than one spouse, or more tolerance for bending the obligations of kinship. If equality is the product of social institutions, then one can never expect that egalitarianism will be complete or all-encompassing. Still, it is possible to formulate a denition of egalitarian societies that is meaningful for social analysis. I will consider as egalitarian societies that maintain equal access of individuals, within age-sex categories, to resources and status positions or, following Frieds (1960) classic denition, societies in which there are as many positions of prestige in any age-sex grade as there are persons capable of lling them. Of the many societies that t this denition of egalitarian, none is strictly undifferentiated (Flanagan 1989). Most institute internal divisions on the basis of age, sex, kinship, or ability in order to apportion tasks and promote complementarity within families or groups. What is difference and what is inequality may be difcult to distinguish. Moreover, the structure of coalitions that
enforce equality and cultural denitions of what constitutes transgression vary considerably and generate different social realities. A minority of egalitarian societies, usually marginalized hunter-gatherers in high-risk environments, achieve high degrees of equality owing to strong mutual dependencies and lack of surplus to distribute to others, amongst other things (Lee 1993, Mitchell 1988, Tanaka 1991, Wiessner 1996, Woodburn 1982). These are often taken as the baseline in models for the emergence of inequality on the dubious assumption that current hunter-gatherer populations provide the best models for Paleolithic societies (Wilmsen 1989, Wobst 1978). Given that most humans, past and present, inhabited richer environments, societies tolerating some competition (Lederman 1986:4, McDowell 1990) and moderate inequalities based on achievement probably constitute more appropriate starting points. Such inequalities may be based on wealth, ritual knowledge (Godelier 1978, Harrison 1985), or cosmologically based moral evaluations such as witchcraft (Kelly 1993, Knauft 1987).
pacted the insitutionalization of inequality in Enga, I will focus on four questions: 1. To what extent could maximizing strategies of agents within existing institutions produce incremental changes in structure that gave them preferential access to resources and allowed them to dominate others? How did egalitarian structures and coalitions hinder or facilitate their efforts? 2. What role did the construction of new institutions to take advantage of new social and economic opportunities with reduced transaction costs play in the emergence of institutionalized inequality? Who constructed these, how, and what selection pressures led to their acceptance? 3. How was ideology involved in altering existing institutions and ushering in new ones? 4. What was the upshot of juxtaposing old institutions and ideologies with new ones?
The Enga and Their Historical Traditions Institutional Change

North (1990) argues that the players (entrepreneurs) and their collaborators (organizations) bring about institutional change intentionally or unintentionally in the course of the pursuit of wealth, income, or other objectives. Competition provides the motor for change, though the path is by no means a straight one. Individual pursuits require the deciphering of a complex environment with ideologies. Because information is incomplete, models are subjective, incentives are incompatible, and feedback is imperfect, actors choices are often not rational and may have unintended consequences. Change is path-dependent because it takes place within the existing institutional matrix and is governed by the knowledge and ideology of the agents; it has its own history. Transaction costs have everything to do with hampering or facilitating change. The above considerations all contribute to what might be called the egalitarian bind. The path on which the emergence of inequality begins is one in which competition is dampened and enterprising individuals are not in a position of power to bring new ideas into regular practice. The ethos of egalitarian societies and their actors centers on redistribution and measured generosity, discouraging accumulation of economic capital. Moreover, pursuing inequality threatens the very egalitarian structures that reduce transaction costs for both the actor and potential followers, drawing social disapproval. Consequently, the attempts of agents to bring about incremental change by deploying gains made from short-term enterprises often dead-end in little big men or local despots (Feil 1987, Watson 1971), both with relatively short careers. To explore how egalitarian structures and coalitions steered the motivations and strategies of actors and imThe Enga are a highland horticultural population of approximately 220,000, most of whom live at altitudes of 1,5002,500 m (g. 1). They are well known in the anthropological literature through the works of Feil (1984), Lacey (1975, 1979, 1980), Meggitt (1956, 1972, 1974, 1977), Talyaga (1982), Waddell (1972), and Wohlt (1978), amongst many others. Their staple crop, sweet potato, is cultivated in an intensive system of mulch mounding to feed large human and pig populations. The Enga population is divided into a segmentary lineage system of phratries or tribes composed of some 1,000 to 6,000 members and their constituent exogamous clans, sub-
Fig. 1. Location of the Enga and their neighbors on the main island of Papua New Guinea.
clans, and lineages.5 The politics of land, social networks, and exchange occupy much of mens time and effort, while women devote themselves primarily to family, gardening, and pig husbandry. Nine mutually intelligible dialect groups have been identied within the Enga population (Brennan 1982). Despite variation among these, all Enga share a language and important economic, social, political, and religious orientations. The Enga historical traditions (atome pii) on which this paper is based are straightforward oral narratives that have been passed down in mens houses and during public events for generations, transmitting information about past events. They are said to have originated in eyewitness accounts and are held distinct from myth (tindii pii). Historical traditions contain information on subsistence, wars, migrations, agriculture, the development of cults and ceremonial exchange networks, leadership, trade, environmental disasters, and fashions in song and dress. They cover a period that begins just prior to the introduction of the sweet potato (250400 years ago) and continues until the present. Accompanying genealogies allow events to be placed in a general chronological framework (table 1). Between 1985 and 1995, Akii Tumu, Nitze Pupu, and I collected and analyzed the historical traditions of 110 tribes (phratries) of Enga.6 Testimonies were heard from powerful and ordinary men alike to uncover the distribution of knowledge and differential interpretation of meaning by men from different segments of the population. We maintained dialogues with the most knowledgeable for evaluation of our ideas as the evidence accumulated. Testimonies were painstakingly analyzed with the help of the pioneering research of the oral historian Roderic Lacey (1975, 1979, 1980) to work out the strengths and weaknesses of the Enga oral record as history. More detailed evidence for most of the topics discussed can be found in Wiessner and Tumu (1998). [For a more detailed discussion of the research methodology, see the appendix that appears in the electronic edition of this issue on the journals web page.]
table 1 Chronological Scheme of Events Discussed in Text

Generations b.p. ca. 912 8 7 Event Introduction of sweet potato to Enga and beginning of Enga historical traditions (ca. 250400 b.p.) Population shift from high altitudes to lower valleys Beginning of early Tee cycle Kepele cult rst practiced by horticulturists of western Enga Sangai bachelors cult instituted and spread westward Ambum wars Beginning of Great Ceremonial Wars Kepele cult, called Aeatee, imported into central Enga War reparations initiated for peacemaking Tee cycle expanded to nance Great Wars Aeatee cult developed to coordinate Tee cycle and Great Wars Female-spirit cult imported into eastern Enga Bachelors cults begin eastward spread Tee cycle begins to subsume Great Wars Aeatee/Kepele cult used to organize the Tee Female courtship added to bachelors cults First contact with Europeans (1934) Last Great War fought (193841) Tee cycle subsumes Great War exchange routes Ains cult 194142 Tee cycle continues to expand 1975 Papua New Guineas Independence
6 5 (ca. 185585?)
4 (ca. 18851915)
3 (ca. 191545)
2 (ca. 194575) 1 (ca. 19752005)
Equality at the Starting Point

Around the time of the introduction of the sweet potato, a sparse population of some 10,000 to 20,000 people inhabited the major valleys of Enga.7 In eastern Enga (1,5001,900 m above sea level), sedentary horticulturalists cultivated taro, yams, and other crops on the at
5. As discussed elsewhere (Wiessner and Tumu 1998), I use tribe, a less precise notion than phratry, because it is a term familiar to the Enga themselves. 6. Akii Tumu, the director of the Enga Cultural Centre, worked with me during every phase of the project, as well as carrying out essential interviews between periods of joint eldwork. Nitze Papu, an Enga lawyer, collected superb family histories from his own clan and did much of the translation work for the project. Without their political acuity and knowledge of Enga culture and history, the project would not have been possible. 7. This is a rough estimate made on the basis of genealogical information (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:appendix 2).
note: We have calculated a generation to be 30 years, though certainly for the earliest generations time distortions are likely to occur. In view of this, events that occurred in the second to fourth generation before the present were roughly dated in relation to known occurrences; from the fth to eight generation before the present they were sequenced by genealogy but no attempts were made at dating. Prior to the eighth generation, they can be neither dated nor sequenced. It is reassuring that trends such as the spread of the Tee cycle or major cults do show temporal consistency within and between areas.
terraces, reserving the mid-slopes for pig forage and the high forest for hunting and gathering. For areas of central Enga (1,9002,100 m) roughly equal emphasis was placed on gardening, hunting, and gathering. In the vast high country of western Enga (2,100 m) lived scattered mobile groups who depended heavily on hunting and gathering. Hunters were attributed great physical strength and the possession of powerful ritual and magic. Shifting horticulturalists, who subsisted on taro and other garden products supplemented by game meat and pork, inhabited the steep, narrow valleys below. Oral traditions of western Enga depict culturally recognized distinctions between horticulturalists and hunters, accompa-
nied by ambiguous relationships of tension and misunderstanding, on the one hand, and marriage and exchange, on the other.8 The economy revolved around subsistence agriculture, hunting, and the trade of nonagricultural products: axe stone, salt, black-palm wood, strings of bark ber, foodstuffs, plumes, shells, and cosmetic oil. Pigs played a secondary role in economy and society. Luxury items such as shells, plumes, and cosmetic oil were readily borrowed and lent to be worn by all on ceremonial occasions; the presence of such goods did not signal the onset of social inequalities. A trade alliance for the export of salt and the import of axe stone originated among the southeastern neighbors of the Enga and ran through the Saka Valley of eastern Enga to central Enga, where the renowned salt springs were located (g. 2). From the very early generations Enga appears to have been an open society of travelers, traders, and experimenters. Mobility was high as people sought trade opportunities, alliances, and spouses, attended rituals, harvested products of the high forest, or took refuge after warfare or severe frost.9 New ideas were introduced on long-distance voyages and internal ones, for example, sessions for dream interpretation that rattled existing representations of reality and opened new possibilities. A broad repertoire of cults was practiced in all areas of Enga to promote fertility, prosperity, and solidarity. Purchase of cult rites, sacred objects, incantations, and the services of ritual experts from other groups who appeared more prosperous was commonplace (Strathern 1994, Wiessner and Tumu 1999). A sense of isolation pervades early historical traditionshouses were widely distributed over the landscape, spouses difcult to nd, new group members welcomed, and public events attended joyously. Throughout Enga two spheres of kinship structured networks of mutual support and reduced the transaction costs of many forms of exchange. Patrilineally inherited clan membership furnished a pool of people who cooperated in agricultural enterprises, defense, procurement of spouses, and communication with the spirit world. Equality of all male clan members ensured that each family held rights over land, labor, and distribution of household produce and received due assistance from group members. Residence was ideally patrilocal, though in practice new members were frequently recruited through maternal or afnal ties. Afnal and maternal ties established by exogamous marriage and maintained by reciprocal exchange provided access to resources and assistance out8. Hunting groups had access to the rich resources of the high forest, including marsupials, pandanus nuts, a variety of edible greens, berries, acorns, mushrooms, seeds, and possibly wild tubers (i.e., Pueraria lobata [Watson 1968]). That they engaged in food exchange with horticulturalists is well recorded in oral tradition, but their degree of dependence is uncertain. Archaeological excavations at Kutepa Rock Shelter in the Porgera Valley carried out by Jo Mangi have revealed at least 10,000 years of periodic occupation at 2,300 m. 9. Watsons (1985) description of Tairora mobility, its reasons, and its role in dening people by where they go is reminiscent of descriptions in early Enga historical traditions.
side the clan. Equality was the ground rule that fostered cooperation and trust in these external relations (Feil 1984) and facilitated residential mobility. That is, immigrants who were given land on the basis of afnal or maternal ties were welcomed and treated as equals; their children became full-edged clan members. Conceptually and in practice these two spheres of kinship and economics (corporate and network-based strategies, in the terms of Blanton et al. 1996) were tightly integrated. The Enga describe this integration by a metaphor of birds that roost in the same tree, y out in different directions in the morning seemingly pursuing their own interests, and return with what they have gleaned to the same nest in the evening. A strong ethic of equality prevailed within the sexes for married men and women. Though it took some years to build reputation, there was no pronounced age hierarchy. Equality of men was asserted by coalitions of allied clan members who ensured that their brothers received equal rights to land, spouses, and assistance from the clan. Relatives of married women, particularly male relatives, enforced equality of women by demanding that their daughters receive as much land, assistance in labor, and wealth for exchanges as did other women, particularly co-wives. Nonetheless, a certain degree of competition was permitted. The tone of some early narratives suggests that equality was maintained both by striving to do as well as others (or somewhat better) and by leveling those who got out of line. Women most likely competed against potential co-wives and sought to channel family wealth to their natal kin as they did in later generations, though their early exploits are rarely detailed. Men competed with other men in warfare, hunting, and trade; men of inuence are occasionally named in early historical traditions.10 Name was gained from distribution, not retention and accumulation. Some insight into sources of inuence in the past can be derived from metaphorical accounts of legacies passed on by tribal founders to their sons. For central and eastern Enga these include the spear (warfare), the pig rope and pig club (ability to raise pigs and pay war reparations), the digging stick (agriculture), the bamboo knife (oratory), the stick for planting taro (the staple crop prior to the sweet potato and an essential food for ceremonial events), and the bundle of charms for attracting wealth of all kinds. Important in the heritage of western groups are hunting ability and meat distribution. In no traditions are objects representing ritual power or ability to attract multiple wives passed on from mythical tribal founders to sons. Finally, genealogies for the early generations indicate that the most gifted men were polygynous, an inequality accepted by clan members because
10. I will avoid using the term big-man as formulated by Sahlins (1963) because (1) it encompasses a wide range of leadership styles (Brown 1990, Godelier and Strathern 1991, Lederman 1990, Roscoe 2000), (2) the role of big-men described in the ethnographic literature has been signicantly shaped by interaction with colonial regimes (Gordon and Meggitt 1985), and (3) it is difcult to ascertain at what point in Enga history inuential men can be called bigmen.
Fig. 2. Schematic representation of major migrations after the introduction of the sweet potato. 13, major migrations shortly after the introduction of the sweet potato which are cited in the text. In reality the situation is much more complex than portrayed here. Between the earliest generations and the fourth generation before the present we recorded the migration histories for ca. 107 clans or large segments of clans in eastern Enga, 105 in central Enga, and 58 in western Enga. In addition, there were frequent migrations of lineages and families, particularly in western Enga. polygyny increased external ties and numbers of offspring born to the clan. All in all, social inequalities are portrayed as slight and ephemeralearly Enga history is a history without heroes.11 The segmentary lineage system of Enga divided the population by descent into tribes, clans, subclans, and lineages, each with their own leaders of achieved status. As equals, parallel units competed and cooperated, struggling to maintain a balance of power and autonomy. Intragroup disputes set off by meat sharing, work sharing, or gossip often led to the departure of one party, suggesting that leveling pressures were operative. Intergroup conict over hunting rights, theft, or insult frequently escalated into wars supported by allies on both sides. Wars solved problems by spacing groupsthe losers were
11. The division of inuence between hunters, warriors, gardeners, traders, and others described in historical traditions and the ways in which their power was curbed recall some of the ethnographic descriptions by Godelier (1982) for the Anga of the eastern Highlands. It is not possible to determine the relative roles of warfare and exchange for building reputation for the earlier generations. In later generations young men displayed skill and willingness to take risks for group benet through warfare, but brilliance in exchange was far more important for building prestige.
displaced or disbanded and absorbed by allied groups where they had close kin. There are no accounts in the historical traditions in which groups were subsumed or subordinated by victors. At no time in Enga history is land shortage presented as a serious concern; it was largely labor that limited production.12 By contrast to equality within the sexes, differences and corresponding moral evaluations between the sexes were pronounced and cosmologically stipulated (see Kelly 1993). Gender inequality was founded in contamination beliefs that relegated the inuence of women to the private sphere, from where they worked to attune the plans and decisions of men to their own interests (Kyakas and Wiessner 1992). Beliefs that separated men and women had as much to do with male-male as with male-female relations and minimized competition between the sexes. Amongst other things, gender inequality protected household wealth and the ties on which mens careers were founded: women, as removed from
12. To say that there is no land shortage per se is not to say that Enga have little concern with land and its defense (Meggitt 1977: 183). Land is critical to a households sustenance, pride, and independence.
politics, were generally immune to violence and ed in times of conict with their possessions, children, and pigs, thereby safeguarding the family wealth and bonds for future exchanges. Ritual life among the Enga of earlier generations, as of later ones, stressed equal participation of all men in communicating with the spirit world. Cults underwrote equality in that all able-bodied men participated in the communal hunt prior to the ceremonies and all families made roughly equal contributions to preparing and provisioning cults. Clans of a tribe provided material for the cult house and one or more peripheral posts that signied their contribution to the whole. Elders or ritual experts presided over certain ceremonies owing to greater knowledge or experience, but such participation did not result in hierarchies based on ritual knowledge or power, nor did ritual expertise spill over into secular affairs. Antagonisms were expressed in verbal or physical aggression; witchcraft, practiced only by some fringe Enga, was used neither to preserve equality nor to create inequality. Thus, at the starting point for this study, Enga egalitarianism had a number of characteristics which steered the choices of enterprising men. First, mild competition to become rst among equals was permitted and even encouraged if it brought benets to the clan. Second, coalitions of men ensured equal access to resources, support, and communication with the spirit world for adult clansmen of all ages. Third, exchange partners in different clans were treated as equalsa relationship that was staunchly defended regardless of age. Fourth, it was largely men who participated in enforcing equality to protect their interests; women had to work through male agnatic kin to secure their rights. At higher levels of organization, coalitions of allied subclans or clans ensured equality of parallel social units. Such features depart signicantly from congurations of equality in other known egalitarian societies such as the !Kung San, who are often used as an egalitarian prototype (Lee 1993). Among the !Kung overt competition is stringently constrained, men and women play similar roles in enforcing equality within and between the sexes, there are no mechanisms to defend the equality of social units, and individuals who gain access to the spirit world through trance hold inuential positions in the group.
PostSweet-Potato Developments
eastern enga The sweet potato slipped into the garden regime of eastern Enga without note in historical traditions. Initially its impact was only an indirect one: an inux of nonEnga immigrants from higher regions seeking good garden land. Some of these immigrants came from key groups in the salt and axe trade to the south and east (g. 2, 1). Once established, they challenged the position of Enga from the Saka Valley in controlling the welldeveloped alliance for the salt and axe trade. In response, Saka Valley Enga constructed a new system through
which to raise wealth, which they invested in alliances to block the plans of their rivals from immigrant groups. As the legend goes, they sent messages and initiatory gifts to partners along well-established trade routes, asking them to provide wealth in the form of pigs on credit rather than by traditional barter. When wealth arriving along these chains of nance reached the Saka Valley, inuential men used it to contract marriages or other alliances. These were investments in the sense that they promised long-term exchange and mutual support. Returns from marriage exchanges or other newly contracted alliances together with wealth from home production were used to repay partners in a public festival. Thus, through the concatenation of former trade partnerships, chains of nance were constructed to make up the skeleton of what was to become the Tee ceremonial exchange cycle (g. 3). The spread of this system of nance and display, called tee lenge (to ask for), is recorded in the historical traditions of other groups along the major trade routes around the seventh generation before the present (Wiessner and Tumu 1998 :16465). The Tee cycle opened many opportunities and reduced the transaction costs associated with long-distance exchange. Through Tee it became possible to elicit nance on credit from people who were beyond the usual bounds of kinship reckoningnance through Tee chains thus partially decoupled economics from kinship, its protocols and etiquette. Formal public wealth distributions conferred name on managers of wealth and fostered trust in their competence. Finally, skillful manipulation of chains of nance maximized the amount of wealth arriving in one place at one point in time, giving recipients the nancial clout to engage in larger projects without having to feed large herds of pigs while they slowly amassed wealth for distribution.13 The Tee cycle, in contrast to the Melpa Moka (Strathern 1971), involved no competition between partners. Partners were dened as equals, and though a man might strive to give generously to please his partner, such small increments were never given in the spirit of competition. Competition in the early Tee existed only between men in different clans striving to control the trade. During the rst two to three generations after the Tee cycle was initiated, it was performed on a very small scale. Few people in a clan participated, even though it was open to all. Oral records indicate that the most successful distributed no more than ve to ten pigs in one Tee festival and that the number of clans involved was limited to some 1020. As a network that clung to clans along trade routes, it did not attract much attention, and its potential remained unrealized. Why? First of all, the average person who was not a regular participant in the
13. Interestingly, pigs, which had previously circulated for local feasts, were the only forms of currency produced in Enga that could be rapidly intensied to meet the needs of increasing political and economic complexity at the time. As a result, they began to be exchanged over great distances, even though the transport of recalcitrant animals could be taxing. See Lemonnier (1996) and Kelly (1988) for interesting discussions of the pig as a currency of exchange.
Fig. 3. Spheres of the Tee cycle, the Great Wars, and Kepele cult networks. trade had little incentive to join and lacked the appropriate ties to do so. Second, the early Tee cycle revolved around pig exchange, but the economy was not geared to pig production. Agricultural production levels were set to meet household subsistence needs, hunting supplied meat for many events, allies in warfare were often compensated with land gained, and bridewealth payments were furnished to a signicant extent by trade goods. The few pigs that were raised for wedding, cult, or funeral feasts derived much of their sustenance from foraging. Only men and women with broader designs saw the potential of the pig as a currency that could be intensively raised and invested to promote individual and clan interests. Some historical testimonies directly report the efforts of inuential men to encourage pig production to increase clan wealth but state that most people were not interestedpig husbandry is drudgery, and its benets had not yet been established. There were few places to spend hard-earned pigs. This situation changed in approximately the fth generation when a new dilemma arosecircumscription. Up until this time, population growth was portrayed as advantageous, providing more eligible spouses nearby and more exchange opportunities as well as increasing the size and strength of groups. Thereafter naratives begin to reect some of the problems caused by growth (see also Modjeska 1982). As land lled up and intraclan wars led to ssioning, sufcient room for spacing hostile subclans within tribal land was no longer available, and migration of one party to an outlying area was undesirable. The clans divided were often brother clans, tightly linked by ties of kinship and exchange. Warfare ruptured their essential interactions and potential to form alliances against major enemies. Consequently, clan leaders sought to institute peacemaking procedures so that they could split into two or more groups but then stay put. The few accounts that describe early attempts at peacemaking tell of ambiguous feelings toward brother groups turned enemy, confusion, and the exploratory efforts of men who stepped forward to reestablish peace. The solution, compensatory words and payments, was composed of the sum total of gifts offered by fellow clansmen to bereaved relatives in the victims clan coordinated into a formal clanwide distribution. Piglets were then earmarked for a series of reciprocal exchanges to take place over the next two to three years. During the protracted period of piglet growth, hostilities were discouraged by the promise of wealth to come and the healing hands of time set to work. Peacemaking through the exchange of war reparations had a number of profound effects on Enga economy and
politics.14 First, it provided an institutional framework which made it possible to reestablish trust and resume social and economic exchange that had been severely disrupted by warfare. Second, it furnished a new role for pigs, one that had import for every clan member. Third, it established a forum in which all clan members could create new ties with families in opposing groups and thereby reduce the possibility of recurrent conict. Fourth, it opened a new arena for men to gain inuencenegotiation and coordination of war reparations required men with outstanding knowledge and political skills. Fifth, the possibility of peacemaking allowed for warfare to be contained and used surgically for a wide range of purposes from establishing a balance of power to fostering exchange and providing a forum in which leaders could make their names (Sillitoe 1978). Thereafter, some wars were fought briey for the exchange that would ensue. Finally, war reparations broadened the role of the Tee cycle from an institution of nance for strategies in the trade to an institution of nance for war reparations. When people of eastern Enga realized the potential of the Tee cycle, clans of eastern Enga joined one by one. Around this time a new locus of competition entered the Tee cycle: competition between fellow clansmen to assemble and distribute wealth as one means to gain inuence. central enga Though historical traditions do not tell of the introduction of the sweet potato to central Enga, they do tell of experiments with the new crop, followed by the extensive reorganization and consolidation of groups inhabiting the high country. The names and designs of the men who achieved tribal integration are not detailed; however, it is clear that the invention and circulation of cults played an important role in the process. Ancestral cults were imported from the west, given local names, and retted to local needs of coordinating tribal segments for collective action. Even more signicant was the institution of communal bachelors cults (Sangai) to supplement former individual rites of growth. Here young men were brought into retreat in the seclusion of a forest hut, where they joined in a group marriage with a spirit woman who was believed to transform the handsome and the ugly alike into physically and socially competent young adults. Praise poetry for the accomplishments of the spirit woman laid down the ideals for men and molded the protagonists of upcoming generations. The Sangai did much to structure relations between menit produced cohorts with shared values and strong bonds of loyalty to one another and placed the education of youth rmly in the hands of elders. It appears that communal bachelors cults originated in central Enga around the seventh generation before the present. Shortly afterward they were imported by clans in the Lagaip Valley
14. See Lemonnier (1990) for a comprehensive and insightful overview of compensation and war reparations in the highlands of New Guinea.
to the west, homogenizing ideas and values among peoples of different valley systems. The upshot of the reorganization of groups in the high country of central Enga was a number of major offensives launched as groups from the high country, where agriculture was precarious, sought to take the frost-free fertile land of the Ambum Valley (g. 2, 2). The original inhabitants were driven out to the northeast, where they established new residences and prospered. The victors, hard-pressed to ll the land they had taken, welcomed immigrants from other tribes. In the course of the Ambum wars much was gained in addition to landthe proliferation of exchange ties, excitement, and opportunities for aspiring leaders. While formerly wars had been fought at the level of subclans or clans, for the Ambum wars much larger unitsbrother tribes and their allies cooperated. Out of efforts to perpetuate the positive aspects of the Ambum wars without the negative ones, high death tolls and loss of land, the Great Ceremonial Wars were born (Wiessner and Tumu 1998). The heroes of the initial episodes of the Great Wars are not named, nor are their goals and organizational tactics detailed; narratives describing later episodes eclipse the earliest ones. All that is remembered is that, drawing on coalitions formed in the Ambum wars and other struggles, tournament wars were organized in which emphasis was placed on display rather than defeat and festivities rather than ghting.15 It was said that the Great Wars were planted like a garden for the harvest that would follow during the subsequent exchanges. Allied tribes, who provided the owners of the ght with housing, food, water, and allied warriors, hosted the Great Wars. Combat took place on designated battleelds belonging to the hosts, where no land could be gained or lost. When the appointed time for battle approached, Great War leaders, who were selected from among the ranks of prominent men, assembled their tribes, hosts, and allies near the battle site. Their battle plans were drawn and a ghting spirit was brewed during a week or more of song and dance. According to historical traditions and eyewitness accounts, when the formal beginning to the tournament was called, Great War leaders (watenge) challenged their counterparts from the opposing side in spectacular displays. Watenge were to be captured or otherwise humiliated but not killed, for they would be the ones to organize ensuing exchanges of wealth. By day the men fought in full ceremonial dress in front of hundreds or thousands of spectators and rows of dancing women who cheered on their heroes. By night they ate and drank with hosts and courted women. But the Great Wars were by no means mock wars. For example, during the last Great War, fought in the late 1930s, many were wounded and three on one side, four on the other were killed. However, casualties remained relatively low owing to the structure
15. There are some vague suggestions in early historical traditions that western Enga might have had semiritualized wars prior to the introduction of the sweet potato. More we do not know.
of the battles, which involved the exchange of volleys of arrows red from a distance between extended lines of warriors. High-casuality tactics such as ambushes and night raids were avoided. As in smaller wars, battles continued for weeks or months until war leaders announced the end, broke their weapons in half, and cast them into the river. The wars were said to be without victors and without angerdeaths were not avenged. The breaking of spears initiated a series of exchanges that would continue for two to four years in which hosts and allies were compensated for their efforts and relationships that had formed between them during battle were transformed into exchange partnerships. Marriages contracted during the Great Wars created new pathways of interaction. Four Great Wars were fought recurrently in central Enga from approximately the sixth generation before the present until the second (g. 3) (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:27388). Virtually everybody except those maimed or killed in battle beneted. The competition signaled strength of alliances, established a balance of power, and furnished a formal context in which to ght out local grudges ensuing from smaller wars. People spanning four valley systems were drawn together for a common purpose and had weeks or months to assess the attributes of potential exchange partners and establish trust. The festive exchanges and marriages following the wars turned new friendships into formalized relationships of exchange for all, though Great War leaders and other managers of wealth attracted more wealth than ordinary men. Pigs, whose production could be readily intensied to meet the needs of Great War exchanges, became a currency with widely accepted value. In the years that followed Great War episodes, small, vicious wars were fought as they had been throughout Enga history. When the momentum generated by a Great War episode wore off after some ten years, a new episode was launched. It would be difcult to imagine a context more amenable to initiatives on the part of enterprising men to build power without treading on the toes of others. The Great Wars furnished a forum for rallying large groups of followers and provided benets for participants without placing disproportionate demands on the household production of leaders. The spirit of group competition, together with the amboyant performances of Great War leaders to challenge and humiliate their opponents in the name of their team, made people eager to invest in their representatives. Very important, Great War leaders were chosen not only by their own sides but by the enemy, who called on desired opponents to step forward, organize their men, and represent their side. In the context of popular demand from both sides and public desire for continuity of leadership to reduce disruptive internal competition, within a generation after the wars were initiated the position was inherited. Historical traditions describe how the public called on the sons or nephews of Great War leaders to replace their fathers (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:appendix 2), but genealogies suggest that
only those who displayed competence actually did so. Achievement still played a role.16 In the era of the Great Wars, shifts in values were expressed in poetry and proverbs. While early bachelors cult poetry centered on physical transformation, in the generations of the Great Wars new verses citing the names of prominent men as role models were added to highlight accomplishments in production and exchange. The proverb You need a man, lauding the value of all men, was modied by a parallel one, Good and healthy trees produce good fruits, and poor trees produce poor fruits. The rules of the game were changing. western enga In western Enga, the sweet potato arrived during a time of famine and was adopted immediately. Its role as a famine-relief food is recalled in both oral tradition and ritual. Population shifts then occurred as former hunter-gatherers moved into the Lagaip Valley in response to the reliable subsistence base provided by the sweet potato (g. 2, 3). There they procured land from afnal and maternal kin in horticultural groups in exchange for various forms of support. Economic and social adjustments were complexpopulation redistribution afforded new economic opportunities but also incited tension as people of different lifestyles meshed. This is evident in a history replete with small, vicious wars that caused many subclans to migrate into outlying areas far from the central valleys in search of a better life (Wohlt 1978). Drawing on the long-standing tradition of complex ritual life in western Enga, responses to conict were largely ritual ones, particularly in the early generations. Cults circulated widely out of efforts to solve new problems and achieve new means of integration. Of circulating cults, the most impressive was the Kepele ancestral cult. The Kepele had its roots in the former ritual of high-country hunting groups. After the introduction of the sweet potato, when horticultural and hunting groups settled side by side, the Kepele was elaborated into an institution that assembled hundreds and in later generations thousands of participants and spectators for ve days of feasting, ritual, and exchange. During the ve-day Kepele celebrations tribes were united, boys initiated, communication with the ancestors restored, and visitors entertained. Equality of male tribal members was expressed by the expectation that each man furnish one pig and one pig only for the ceremonies and through the immediate and equitable distribution of food. On these festive occasions, pigs took on ritual signicance and became standard currency, orientations favoring small circles of close kin were expanded to encompass the brotherhood of all tribal members, and vicious cycles of runaway aggression between
16. The role of such tournament events in establishing and perpetuating institutionalized leadership is reminiscent of the ball games, prehistoric and historic, in Mesoamerica (Fox 1996, Hill, Blake, and Clark 1998).
clans of a tribe were halted. Kepele cults of over 50 western Enga tribes were woven into a network held together by circulating ritual experts, sharing of rites and innovations, and attendance by relatives from other tribes in the network (g. 3). If one considers the Kepele cult network as a whole, its sphere of inuence is equal to that of the Great Wars and the Tee cycle. The atmosphere of cooperation and trust generated in the Kepele, the gathering of people from far and wide, and the cessation of hostilities for celebration paved the way for inter- and intragroup exchange while reducing associated risks. From organizing these great events, men earned prestige that allowed them to elicit cooperation and license. However, in contrast to the situation in the Great Wars and the Tee cycle, opportunities for investment in relationships and ensuing prots were few (Wiessner 2001). During the fourth generation men of the west, like those in other parts of Enga, found a new way of gaining inuence with the institution of peacemaking procedures. As a result of efforts in many areas of life, over the generations they brought about a shift from a heterarchy of power (Ehrenreich, Crumley, and Levy 1995) distributed amongst ritual experts, renowned cassowary hunters, traders, mediators, and warriors to a hierarchy topped by managers of wealth and political relations. But because of their starting point in hunting and gathering or shifting agriculture and the poorer agricultural conditions of western Enga, they never gained wealth or regional inuence comparable to that of their counterparts in eastern or central Enga.
of the two networks within a circle of emerging elites. Meanwhile, at the eastern end of the Tee cycle, Tee managers sought to consolidate power by investing in pearl shells, valuables which could not be produced by all, did not have limited life spans or voracious appetites, and were most accessible to those with well-established long-distance ties. It was with the development of complex regional politics to link the two exchange systems that the nature of leadership began to change, as is recorded in the history of the family of Pendaine, the man who rst coordinated the Great Wars and Tee cycle (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:33031, quoting Kopio Toya Lambu, Yakani Timali clan, Lenge): It is said that my great-grandfather Kepa [Pendaines father] did not wear a headdress of bird-of-paradise feathers, nor did he boast. Kepa did not sing any songs about how wealthy he was. He wanted to be friends with everybody and was very cautious not to create bad feelings among his people and especially with his Tee partners. It was in the time of Kepa that strong leaders began to emerge. Towards the end of his lifetime, when Kepa was an old man, competition began to appear in the Tee cycle and along with it Tee politics. The Tee and strong leadership grew together and reinforced each other. This did not happen overnight. Kopio goes on to mention that as the Tee grew, a new counting system was introduced, replacing a former system based on body parts that reached 27. In the new system, people counted by twos up to 40 and then continued with one bundle of 40 and 2, 4, 6, up to two bundles of 40, and so on up into the hundreds. Of the new system Kopio remarks: All of these things happened following one important event: the institution of the counting system. Before its introduction nobody really knew for sure who was the real kamongo (leader). When the counting system was introduced, people were able to tell who was the real kamongo. Apparently, with increasing regional competition, there was interest in comparing achievements of kamongo between groups and between different Tee cycles. Ritual developments were transacted hand-in-hand with exchange. Notable among these were initiatives of eastern clans to import bachelors cults that were seen as responsible for producing the magnicent cohorts of men displayed in the Great Wars. An unintended consequence of this bachelors cult transmission was the standardization of ideals for young men and ideas on relations between the sexes so essential for facilitating the interarea marriages on which exchange networks depended. Women of eastern Enga had input in the third generation before the present when they added a phase of disruptive courtship to bachelors cult emergence ceremonies in which girls publicly expressed marriage preferences. The merging of the Great Wars and the Tee cycle posed problems of coordination, cooperation, and timing that
The Merging of the Great Wars and the Tee Cycle

By the fourth generation before the present (table 1) the popularity of the Great Wars was mounting and placing heavy demands on the owners of the ght and their hosts. Seeking new ways to nance their tournament wars, Great War leaders of central Enga, whose clans spanned the Tee cycle and Great Wars, traveled to eastern Enga. Drawing on their fund of inuence from highprole performance in the Great Wars and inherited position, they effectively campaigned to lengthen Tee chains and time Tee cycles to deliver wealth for Great War exchanges. Of particular note in such efforts was the Great War leader and Tee organizer Pendaine of Lenge, in central Enga (born ca. 1870), a modest monogamous man of few words but a spectacular performer in the context of the Great Wars. Once the two networks were connected, some phases of the Tee cycle were used to bring wealth from eastern to central Enga to fuel the Great War exchanges and others to channel wealth from the Great War exchanges back to eastern Enga to repay creditors. Both networks ourished. Historical testimonies and genealogies indicate that families at the top of both networks intermarried in order to combine information and establish ties crucial to the coordination
table 2 Schematic Relationship of the Aeatee Cult to the Organization of the Tee Cycle and the Flow of Wealth to and from the Tee Cycle and Great Wars Exchanges
Aeatee Cult Phase 1 Prepare building materials for cult house, marsupial feast, tribe united Phase 2 Prepare ceremonial grounds, marsupial feast. Tee organizers come up from eastern clans Phase 3 House construction, pork feast, more initiatory gifts given to guests from east Phase 4 Fertility rites, marsupial feast, tribe united Phase 5 Rites for ancestral stones, pork feast, Tee organizers set off for the east to request the main gifts in the Tee cycle Phase 6 Burning of cult house and major pork feast; when the Aeatee cult is completed, the Yae phase of the Tee cycle begins Tee Cycle Great Wars
Saandi Pingi: initiatory gifts of piglets, pork, goods, and valuables sent from west to east with Tee organizers More initiatory gifts sent east
Wealth from Great War exchanges channeled into initiatory gifts for the Tee cycle Same as above
Tee Pingi: main gifts sent from east to west
Main Tee gifts channeled into Great War exchanges
Yae Pingi: return gifts of butchered pork sent from west to east
Opponents in Great Wars compete to burn Aeatee cult house Wealth from Great War exchanges sent east in Yae Pingi
note: Though the relation of the Aeatee to the Tee cycle remained relatively constant, the Tee cycle and the Great Wars were changing so rapidly from the fth generation on that this scheme represents but one of several possible ways in which the three systems were linked.
threatened to foil the efforts of even the most astute Tee cycle managers. It was in this context that a version of the Kepele ancestral cult, which had been imported from western Enga at an earlier date and practiced on a small scale, was expanded and molded into quite a different institution in the name of furthering prosperity. And prosperity it brought by facilitating the coordination of the burgeoning exchange cycles. The names of the men who shaped the cult and their political intent are not detailed in historical traditions. What we do know is that the Kepele was renamed Aeatee, its western praise name, and crafted into an elaborate six-phase cult spread out over a period of some ve to ten years (table 2). The Aeatee, like other cults of the time, departed from the male-dominated ideology of past ancestral cults and emphasized essential cooperation between the sexes. Like the Kepele, the Aeatee assembled entire tribes, articulated relations between clans, restored communication with the ancestors, and evoked condence and prosperity. Unlike the Kepele, the Aeatee was directly geared to the needs of secular exchange networks, though such connections were masked. During the initial phases, Tee managers from the east were invited to attend, and in the shadow of this lavish cult the Tee was organized. Each of the later stages of the Aeatee was then attuned carefully to the timing of the three-phase Tee
cyclethat is, when Aeatee festivities were complete and celebrants had returned home, the appropriate phase of the Tee cycle would be launched. In this process, relations of equality and inequality were juxtaposed. Equality of all men and group interest were rst expressed in cult rites and then individuals were challenged to break with the same through entrepreneurial tactics in Tee exchange. In a sense the Tee cycle can be seen as an institution crafted from three exchange networks: the early Tee cycle of eastern Enga, the Great Wars of central Enga, and the Kepele cult network of western Enga. Some Enga say that it was the Aeatee that made the Tee possible (Lacey 1975). At a time when organizing the Tee cycle involved coordinating some 100200 widely dispersed clans, Aeatee celebrations did much to reduce costs of communication and coalescence. They demonstrated the unity, prosperity, and readiness of tribes for the Tee cycle, gathered key managers from the entire network in one place at one time, and focused the energy necessary to launch a new phase of the Tee cycle. Years of footwork in the rugged Enga landscape could not accomplish what the Aeatee achieved in a week of celebrations.17
17. Other clans in the Tee followed suit by importing cults to demonstrate prosperity and gather crowds to plan the Tee (Wiessner
For some decades, managers spanning the Tee cycle and the Great Wars were able to use their information advantage to keep the two systems apart and prot by being major players in each.18 Despite such efforts, more and more participants in the Great Wars became aware of the advantages of the Tee cycle, and, feeling that the Tee might bring them more wealth at lower cost than the Great Wars, they joined. Around 1939 the last of the Great Wars was fought; thereafter Great War exchange networks were subsumed by the Tee cycle. Many new branches were added to the Tee cycle over the next decades, facilitated by the colonial administrations ban on warfare, to constitute a network of some 375 clans (g. 3). According to historical traditions, the motivation of Great War leaders for replacing the Great Wars with the Tee cycle was to reduce the immense organizational burden of the Great Wars, increase relative individual gains, and avoid senseless deaths. But in opting for the Tee cycle Great War leaders made a fatal error for the institutionalization of leadership. In contrast to leadership in the Great Wars, leadership in the Tee cycle was not inherited, though some elders say that it was difcult for men outside of a Tee managers patrilineage, people of one blood, to rise to the top.19 The persistence of egalitarian exchange institutions at lower levels such as bridewealth, child growth payments, and funerary prestations that fed wealth into the Tee cycle allowed ambitious men to challenge those on top. Whereas a single chain of collaborators had ushered wealth from one end of the Tee network to another in preceding generations, after the Great Wars were discontinued ambitious individuals who could not break into the central chain of elite formed parallel competing chains (Feil 1984), introducing a new dimension of competition into the Tee. Competing leaders in a single clan could belong to different chains, each with its own designs for the timing and course of the Tee. Nonetheless, prior to the colonial period, once one chain had launched a potentially successful Tee cycle, clan interest took precedence over internal competition and clan brothers joined forces and put on a good show for clan name.20
and Tumu 1999). Notable among these is the female-spirit cult, which was imported by inuential men of eastern Enga within living memory of elders or their fathers. The female-spirit cult (Strathern 1970, 1979; Strathern and Stewart 2000), like the Aeatee, celebrated male-female cooperation and associated a new valuable, the pearl shell, with supernatural power. 18. For instance, Kyakas Sapu of the Yanaitini Lanekepa clan told us in 1991: We did not want these people to see our source of pigs. Those places [where the Great Wars were held] were our source of pigs and were referred to as our Tee tree in gurative speech. . . . We told them [Tee managers from the east] that these places were the lands of savages. We did so because we did not want them to see these places; if they did it would have weakened our position. 19. Meggitt (1965:1719) calculated that the average size of a patrilineage in central Enga was 48 members or 7.5 families. Patrilineage members usually know their precise genealogical connections. 20. This was to change during the colonial era with pacication and conversion to Christianity. At this time two unifying clan activities, warfare and ancestral cults, were discontinued, permitting a greater degree of individualism.
But between the 1940s and 1970s what had been a streamlined system gave way to shifting factionalism and ruthless competition (Feil 1984) as new wealth and status positions were introduced by Europeans. Elders mention four inuences of European contact that made powerful Tee managers lose their grip on the Tee: (1) Any able-bodied man could work for Europeans, obtain wealth through wages or looting during administration patrols, and participate in the Tee cycle, bypassing traditional channels for building wealth and reputation. (2) European goods (axes, bush knives, and shovels) could be taken to newly contacted areas by patrol members and, as rare and highly desired goods, be exchanged for large pigs to be given in the Tee cycle. (3) Men hired as go-betweens for the administration and Tee managers built direct exchange ties with leading Tee managers, ties that were otherwise closed to those who did not marry into leading lineages. (4) Owing to patrols, marriages were contracted far outside the sphere of the Tee cycle, and as distant afnal kin were integrated into the Tee its boundaries were extended.21 Thus, a man of the fourth generation like Pendaine had kept the allegiance of a huge following through his role as Great War leader and Tee cycle organizer, commanding an extensive network with the help of a single wife, two children, servants, and loyal followers. His son Lambu, who received recognition and support from the colonial administration, married 20 wives to try to accomplish the same and had between 14 and 30 servants (kendemane, literally roped men), handicapped or dispossessed people recruited from outside his clan. The sons of prominent Tee cycle managers were still in good positions to replace their fathers, but they had to ght constantly to hold their ground.
What Changed?
Over a period of some 250400 years after the introduction of the sweet potato, signicant changes took place in Enga. Population growth offered many new opportunities and was a contributing factor to the settlement of fringe areas of Enga.22 The economy was transformed from one based on shifting taro horticulture and hunting and gathering to a surplus economy based on sweet potato cultivation and intensive pig husbandry. A heterarchy of power distributed over hunters, traders, warriors, ritual experts, and managers gave way to hierarchy as leaders steered an economy with the potential for
21. Testimonies of Kyakas Sapu, Kambao Lambu, Ambone Mati, Lete Aiyaka, and Sowelya Kanopato, July 2001. Interestingly, none of these elders mentioned that the cessation of warfare was a central factor in the expansion of the Tee cycle, though when asked they said it probably was a contributing factor. 22. We have estimated growth to be about 1.1% per annum (see Wiessner and Tumu 1998:11617). Though this may seem high for a precontact population, most areas of Enga are free of tropical diseases, water sources are clean, the climate is temperate, and food is plentiful. Enga elders name population growth as the cause of such developments as clan ssion, emigration, and the need for better means of communication.
rapid growth. Within the sphere of the Tee cycle and the Great Wars a two-tiered system of leadership emerged (Pupu 1988). At the top were Tee managers and Great War leaders who mastered the large exchange networks. Beneath them were local leaders who managed internal clan affairs. Enterprising men of the sixth generation before the present who participated in the Tee cycle were able to distribute some 10 pigs; by the second generation some were able to assemble and give away 250 pigs or more together with numerous goods and valuables. Character descriptions in historical traditions reect a tendency toward the formalization of leadership. While those from earlier generations depict personal traits or actions, those of later generations dwell on blackened faces, stance, grandeur, formal apparel, and eloquent oratory, substituting the details of person with a more anonymous cultural ideal. Over a period of some ve to six generations hierarchy had developed, inequality was inherited in the context of the Great Wars, and Tee cycle managers and Great War leaders had achieved control over institutions that stretched far beyond the boundaries of their clans. Their names were known far and wide. How did this situation come to be?
Agents and Egalitarian Institutions

Let us return to the rst question: What was the role of individual maximizing strategies within existing institutions in bringing about incremental change that led to institutionalized inequality? Throughout the course of history the enterprising did gain some economic advantage by interpreting rules to their advantage or pushing them to their limits. There is no reason to believe they had not done so long before the introduction of the sweet potato. They farmed out pigs to others (who were repaid in piglets born) to prot from the land and labor of others, married more wives, attracted more unattached individuals to their labor forces, and enticed support from a wider sphere of kin. Social competence, together with license conferred by prestige, allowed them to get away with more than the average person. They invested their gains in attracting supporters and in constructing new institutions. How far did such efforts bring them on the road to inequality? Comparison of the distribution of rights and resources depicted in the sixth to eighth generations with that in the second to third generation produces a surprising answer. Except in western areas where former hunters and gatherers abandoned their lifestyle to become horticulturalists, basic institutions and ideologies described in early oral traditions persisted. Land continued to be passed on in the family or lineage. When family land was plentiful, as it was in many areas throughout Enga history, men could give land to afnal kin if they joined the clan. However, strong opposition on the part of subclan members prevented them from releasing land to outsiders or taking the land of brothers. By the colonial era, big-men did not have signicantly larger landholdings per household member than their fellow
clansmen, though they had larger households and more of their family land under cultivation (Meggitt 1974:191 n. 43). The same applies to labor. At no point in Enga history did men appropriate the labor of other households in their clans; strong ethics of equality saw to that. The greatest managers were able to attract more dispossessed or handicapped individuals from other clans into their labor forces, but these servants never lost their right to come, go, and shift allegiances.23 Equal access to the means of production left its mark on the landscapethe basic structure and spacing of household compounds was not signicantly altered with the expansion of exchange networks. Throughout the time span considered, all men retained the right to bridewealth support from fellow clanspeople. Clansmen avenged every member, right or wrong, for harm inicted upon them. Poverty barred no young man from marrying, and no man was forced into contractual debt to procure a spouse. Genealogies indicate that polygamy was practiced from the earliest generations on, though marriage to more than two or three spouses was rare in all generations (see also Meggitt 1965, Waddell 1972, Wohlt 1978). Group members, who welcomed brides to produce sons and daughters for the clan, did not discourage polygyny. Rather, protest against multiple polygamous marriages came from wives and coalitions of in-laws. If a second or third wife received less than other wives in terms of attention, land to cultivate, and, most important, wealth to give to her relatives, they encouraged divorce and remarriage into a more economically promising union. Only the most capable of men could manage polygyny.24 In external exchange, each household received nancing for its enterprises from maternal and afnal kin outside the clan, and all households held onto their own pig ropes in ceremonial exchanges. That is to say, wealth was not pooled and distributed by managers during clan presentations; rather, each household gave its contributions to its own partners in public and reaped the returns. This right was enforced not only by clan members but also by maternal kin and in-laws, who sought to keep tabs on their gifts in order to be assured of reciprocation. There is only one area in which serious inroads were made into the equal distribution of resourcesaccess to information critical to managing the ow of wealth and ideas in the great exchange networks. Of course, we know little about the distribution of information in Enga for the early generations; however, the new techniques of information management detailed in historical traditions do suggest signicant developments. For example, most elders say that symbolic speech was elab23. This practice was not newthe few individuals who contributed little to the clan and could not establish households had always been held in ridicule and considered fair game for exploitation. 24. In the colonial period, when leaders were given xed ofcial status and greater access to wealth, some men engaged in hyperpolygyny. For instance, Lambu, the son of Pendaine, married 13 wives; his domestic life was fraught with conicts extending even to homicide between co-wives.
orated over generations to transmit messages in public oratory that would be understood only by a select few. Men and women from leading families in the Tee cycle and the Great Wars intermarried as part of their efforts to restrict the ow of information essential to playing the exchange networks in their favor. Managers spanning the Tee cycle and Great Wars used deceit and rumor to keep the two systems apart for one to two generations. Finally, leading families began to pass on family histories which detailed the strategies, failures, and accomplishments of their forebears so that younger members could nd inspiration and legitimation in the actions of those who had gone before. The knowledge differential between men interviewed was impressivesome men knew the history of vast exchange networks, others could hardly see beyond their garden fences. Nonetheless, the information advantage did not go uncontested. Continual efforts were made by rivals to prevent others from managing information by circulating disruptive rumors along the Enga telegraph: words shouted from ridge to ridge and interpreted according to the designs of the receivers.
New Institutions
The construction of new institutions was a task to which managers devoted considerable effort and which in turn gave them their greatest advantagesregional inuence, information control, and access to new ideas. By building new economic institutions such as the Tee cycle and the Great Wars to reduce transaction costs and thereby make large-scale regional exchange protable, managers gained access to the resources of a much broader population without draining the wealth of their own followers. It is the material goods procured on regional voyages that remain in the archaeological record; however, the less visible ideas brought home from journeys had a greater impact on economy and society. Because new institutions ventured into unclaimed social and economic territory, new rules could be constructed without threatening existing relationships. In constructing the early Tee cycle, men appear to have entertained visions no broader than the pursuit of immediate personal interests. However, the majority of the institutions that arose in the course of Enga history were not a product of individual aggrandizement leading to institutional change. Rather, they originated when leaders recognized potential in spontaneous events, discussed them with fellow clanspeople, and attempted to alter, formalize, and perpetuate them in such a way as to address current problems confronting their groups. We are fortunate to have two well-documented cases of how spontaneous events affected institutional change. The rst occurred in the early 20th century when the Great War leader Pendaine mistakenly slew a beloved kinsman during one of the Great War battles. Thereafter he is said to have weighed the value of the Great Wars against the Tee cycle together with his fellow Yakani clansmen. They decided that discontinuing the Great Wars and
weaving their exchange networks into the Tee cycle would produce greater prosperity while avoiding senseless deaths. In this case, one institution was actively selected over another. Other groups followed their lead, expanding the Tee cycle to unwieldy proportions. The second incident occurred between 1915 and 1920 in the context of a bachelors cult festival. Two women of eastern Enga, overcome by jealousy, broke the solemnity of an emergence festival, pulling a man out of the dance line and ghting over him ferociously. So amused was the crowd that clan leaders did not intervene. The word spread, and women from other clans followed suit. After some consideration, men accepted their actions with grudging tolerance because they drew the desired crowds to witness the upcoming generation of men and then linger to plan upcoming exchange events. Within two decades, aggressive female competition had become a regular and regulated highlight of bachelors cults (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:24143). The acquisition of existing institutions from other groups involved an even greater degree of intentionality. Cults and exchanges of other groups that were seen as potentially benecial were introduced to clan members by leading men of a clan and their dimensions explored. If they were deemed promising, wealth was raised for their purchase or, in the case of the Tee, plans were made to phase wealth distributions into the Tee cycle. Here again, the strongest selection pressure for their adoption was group interest, even though those who promoted new institutions were keenly aware of how they might play them to their own advantage as well. Once acquired, new institutions went through a trial period in which most clansmen were involved. From historical traditions it is possible to identify at least six factors that gave new institutions appeal. The rst was their utility in dealing with major perturbations, such as problems ensuing from population shifts after the introduction of the sweet potato, population growth, and scalar stress generated by the large exchange networks. A second appeal was the potential of new institutions for nancing existing exchanges which were essential to reproducing individual and clan autonomybridewealth, compensation to allies, child growth payments, and funeral feasts. The new was summoned to support the old. A third appeal was factional competition (Brumel 1994), as groups sought innovations which were perceived to enhance the prosperity of rivals. A fourth was the charisma of the men who backed innovations and the ability of inuential men to demonstrate that they worked positively and produced what Meggitt (1967) has called the gravy train. A fth appeal was that in principle all men had an equal chance to gain wealth and prestige through new institutions which regulated social and economic exchange, though in practice some men were in a better position to do so than others. Finally, new institutions appear to have been valued for their anticipated strength and prosperity. Forward-looking attitudes are expressed in narratives describing the entrance of groups into the Tee cycle and the adoption of bachelors cults, ancestral cults, and war reparations to
the enemy. Historical traditions present change as positive and to be anticipated in the future. In view of these selection processes, it is questionable whether the individualistic aggrandizer is a meaningful unit of analysis for societies in which personal welfare is so deeply embedded in cooperative egalitarian coalitions (M. Strathern 1988, Strathern and Stewart 2000).
Ideology, Institutions, and Change

Ideologies were altered along with institutions as managers and their fellow clansmen imported cults and put new ideas into practice. Most ideological change concerned the parameters governing cooperation and competitionwhether competition could exist at all, with whom, when, over what, and for what rewards. It was changes to these rules of the game that allowed new institutions and social alliances to unfold. Spheres of cooperation were expanded along paths paved by circulating cults, which standardized norms and values. As geographical horizons broadened, so did ideas concerning the limits of the world and how it worked, giving Enga the impression of rapidly increasing social complexity that is so often mentioned in historical traditions. Tolerance for moderate competition was expanded and eventually superseded by admiration for overt and amboyant competition in the context of managing the great exchange networks, as bachelors poetry molded ideas for wealthy men. Meanwhile, the growing body of historical narratives softened the guidelines of traditionthey presented growth, innovation, and outstanding performance by some as the expected course of events and primed young men to anticipate a lifetime lled with changes. Who could compete with whom changed little throughout the course of history. All adult clansmen remained potential equals in competition. Men and women were dened as different and not potential competitors. Kinsmen and exchange partners outside the clan remained cooperators and strict equals, by contrast to Melpa Moka, in which partners competed and engaged in alternating inequality (Strathern 1971). The primary contexts for competition and cooperation also persisted: men competed in oratory, self-presentation, warfare, and, above all, exchange. They cooperated in agricultural enterprises, procuring of brides, clan defense, and communication with the spirit world. Nonetheless, some changes did take place. The position of Great War leader became inherited and was thus removed from the sphere of intragroup competition. Moreover, as the dependency of men on women in exchange increased, families became Tee-making units. The theme of the essential complementarity of men and women was placed at the center of bachelors, ancestral, and female-spirit cults, contributing to the relaxation of relations between the sexes. In the 1930s and 1940s a number of widows participated in the Tee in their own right, competing directly with men. One woman, Takime, even became a prominent Tee cycle manager (Kyakas and Wiessner 1992).
The import, export, and performance of cults constantly altered denitions of value. Gifts and commodities, particularly pigs and pearl shells, were given new worth and meaning through their association with the sacred in ancestral cults (Wiessner 2001). Verses added to bachelors cult poetry that updated the ideals for men placed increasing emphasis on success in ceremonial exchange. The stakes in competition also took on new dimensions. In the earlier generations those who excelled became mediators in internal relations and in relations with neighboring clans, managed polygynous marriages, and produced more wealth than others at home but left few privileges to their sons. By the rst half of the 20th century, those at the top held names known throughout Enga and had widespread inuence, several wives, servants, and control over the vast amounts of wealth owing in exchange networks. The ethos of equality had been eroded to the point where leadership was inherited in the context of the Great Wars and the sons of Tee managers stood a much greater chance than their peers of replacing their fathers (see also Strathern 1971:20812). While the aspects of competition and cooperation that did change made a difference, two that did not change may have made all the difference in the course of Enga history. The rst was that equal access to the reproduction of relations with the spirit world was guarded as a fundamental right of all group members and never became an arena for competition. For many of the smaller cults, there were no ritual expertsolder men of experience jointly directed proceedings. For larger cults, particularly those of western Enga, there was a strict separation of sacred and secular power. Ritual experts from within the group were classied as eccentric, fearsome specialists and noncompetitors in secular affairs. Their authority was further curbed by relegating them to specic aspects of cult performance and summoning ritual experts from other groups, even different linguistic groups, to co-preside over ceremonies. Conversely, managers of wealth were barred from the role of ritual expert by the stigma of eccentricity and by a wandering lifestyle that precluded building a power base at home. All families of a clan were, in principle, equal sponsors of cults. The enterprising could manage ritual life only indirectly by supporting the import or export of certain cults, participating heavily in the organization of cult performances, or inviting desired external ritual experts from elsewhere. Thus managers could never take hold of the forces considered responsible for the reproduction of fertility and prosperity. The second aspect that did not change concerned the nature of competitionthat the road to success was one of distribution, not retention and accumulation.25 To win was to furnish benets for group members or manage
25. Some pastoralists in volatile social and natural environments hold both an egalitarian ethos and a contrasting emphasis on accumulation (Salzman 1999). The egalitarian ethos among men may facilitate stock-exchange partnerships which secure families who move rapidly from riches to rags in the event of raiding, drought, or disease (Bollig 1998).
wealth in such as way as to assemble as much as possible at one place and one point in time for distribution. Distribution was investment, not a giveaway; expected returns ensured nancial clout for the future. Values opposing accumulation were instilled at the onset of adulthood: a prospective groom should have some pigs in his house for bridewealth but not so many as to signal selshness and poor prospects as a future exchange partner. Consequently, throughout the course of Enga history no material goods were accumulated, nor were any categorized as inalienable possessions representing person and power (Weiner 1992). Accumulation of wealth was constrained by coalitions of clanspeople as well as those composed of afnal and maternal kin. The former conceded prestige gained in exchange only for assistance in payments which gave them equal life chances bridewealth, child growth payments, funerary prestations, and war reparations. The latter, which provided essential support from outside the clan, demanded that surplus wealth be channeled into kinship dues. With success dened in terms of management and redistribution, men had little to pass on to their sons other than family name, information, and social ties.
Old and New Institutions Juxtaposed

Throughout Enga history new institutions were constructed or imported and added to the cultural repertoire to coexist with former ones. Enga history might be described as additive. Most Enga narrators nd points of articulation between the old and new but do not expect a coherent cultural repertoire (Barth 1981:49; Rodseth 1998). New institutions allowed people to pursue opportunities with reduced transaction costs; old ones based on egalitarian principles continued to reduce transaction costs in everyday social and economic exchange. As long as former institutions persisted, the enterprising did not have to renege on traditional roles and obligations in order to engage in new ones. The simultaneous operation of both the old and the new provided continuity and security at the local level that lowered the risks associated with experimentation. When the new faltered, people fell back on the old, allowing the society to cycle between different phases of complexity (David and Sterner 1999, Leach 1954). An interesting parallel case of the juxtaposition of institutions can be found in the work of Tuzin (1976, 1997, 2001) on the Ilahita Arapesh. In the last quarter of the 19th century, the village of Ilahita adopted the Abelam Tambaran cult in response to the need to maintain village cohesion in the face of Abelam military advancement. The Tambaran became an overarching hierarchically organized institution that regulated social life and social cohesion on principles of dual organization. In Tuzins (2001:127) words, it relieved, but was also a product of, the stresses engendered by egalitarianism under conditions where disputants could not longer go their own ways. The Tambaran introduced values dramatically opposed to former egalitarian ones, such as degradation of women, but these
were subscribed to in the ritual setting only (see also Harrison 1985). In secular life, the former egalitarian ethos persisted, and so with the demise of the Tambaran people reverted to their former ethos and went their own ways in a rapidly changing world (Tuzin 1997). The growing popularity of and participation in new institutions introduced dimensions to change that were out of the hands of individual agents and with which they strove to keep abreast. For example, the circulation of goods in the Tee cycle eclipsed the trade in central areas but made it more protable at the margins from where valuables were imported to fuel exchange cycles, putting some traders out of business (Mangi 1988, Meggitt 1956). Bridewealth, child growth payments, funerary prestations, and compensation to allies became greatly inated, as they were used to channel wealth into the Tee cycle and were fueled by wealth owing out of it. Like it or not, everybody had to step up production. Over time the Great Wars drew so many participants that their organization eventually defeated Great War leaders. The upshot of preserving older institutions based on egalitarian ideals side by side with newer ones rather than replacing them was that older exchanges provided a ladder on which enterprising men could climb to challenge those at the top. The valuing of the pig, a good that could be produced locally by all households (Lemonnier 1996), further aggravated competition. By the time of rst contact with Europeans, the major exchange networks of Enga were headed for a fall because of their uncontained growth and popularity. The Great Wars collapsed one by one as they became unmanageable; the last was fought in 1939, and its networks were subsumed by the Tee cycle. The Tee cycle continued to expand and thrive for some decades under the Pax Britannica and with the injection of new wealth brought by Europeans. It foundered in the 1970s and has not been performed since, as inuential men have turned their sights toward provincial and national elections. Today smaller exchanges such as bridewealth, child growth payments, funerary exchanges, and war reparations ll the gap left by the Tee cycle. Older men who walked from one end of Enga to the other to organize the Tee cycle between the 1930s and the 1960s feel that the Tee cycle might eventually have fragmented without European interference. They argue that the Tee cycle had simply grown too large and competitive for managers to control the information essential to its organization and to persuade such a large following to comply with their plans.
Broader Implications
Returning to the question of structure and agency, certainly individual agency left its mark in the testimonies of Enga history. However, there is little evidence that the initial steps to the institutionalization of hierarchical inequality were the products of inuential agents appropriating the resources of fellow group members or that they sought to do so. Individual success was too heavily embedded in group ideals and group welfare, and
egalitarian coalitions were too strong. Where agents made their biggest gains was by helping develop or import new institutions to tap hitherto undeveloped realms of the economy and to alter norms and ideals. New institutions arose not as a by-product of aggrandizement but when individuals, usually clan leaders, recognized the potential in spontaneous events, discussed these with fellow clanspeople, and attempted to frame them into more formal institutions to address group problems. The innovations promoted were ones that leaders felt could be played to their own advantage; the innovations that stuck were those that worked for the individual and the group. Additional selection pressures favoring new institutions arose with perturbations to the system, lending some support to adaptationist approaches. A nal force of change that cannot be attributed to the direct action of individual agents brought unintended consequencesthe juxtaposing of new and old institutions and their interactive effect. But the main thrust of my argument concerns the structure of egalitarian societies. As the Enga case illustrates, egalitarianism is not the product of simplicity; its structures may be as varied and complex as hierarchical structures of power. Egalitarian structures have important consequences for reducing the high transaction costs of social and economic exchange and are maintained by social coalitions within a society. All known egalitarian societies are partitioned by socially dened distinctions drawn along the lines of age, gender, ability, or kinship roles; equal rights to status positions and resources within these partitions may be maintained by different social coalitions. The strength and conguration of these coalitions, together with ideologies of what constitutes a transgression of the norms of equality, produce a wide range of variation in so-called egalitarian societies as well as in pathways to inequality. In closing I would like to briey explore such variation by comparing Enga with other societies, particularly African societies for which material from ethnography, oral history, archaeology, and historical or comparative linguistics is available. For Enga it is possible to identify a number of features of egalitarian ethos and egalitarian coalitions which inuenced the options of the enterprising. Very important in this context is that the Enga ethos did not exclude competition; rather, all men were encouraged to strive to do well, and the successful were rewarded with prestige if their efforts beneted the group. This is in sharp contrast to the situation of foragers in Africa such as the San or the Hadza, where competition is avoided in childhood by the absence of competitive games (Konner 1972, Marshall 1976, Sbrezny 1976) and suppressed in adulthood by both cultural institutions and leveling action (Lee 1993, Marshall 1976). When the ethos of egalitarianism nips competition in the bud, there are formidable barriers to the emergence of leadership and institutionalized social inequalities. For Enga, three axes of egalitarianism and their accompanying coalitions were prominent. The rst was the potential equality of all clansmen that guaranteed equal
access to land, labor, and exchange relationships and clan support in procuring spouses for all men. Under these conditions the most gifted young men could become emergent big-men (Strathern 1982) shortly after marriage. Such equality of access to the means of production and reproduction inhibited the exploitation of the labor of juniors in the process of competition for wives, what Illife (1995:95) calls one of the most dynamic and enduring forces in African history. Moreover, all mature men held equal rights in the reproduction of relations with the ancestors as soon as their households could produce pigs for ancestral cults. Through ancestral cults the ethos of social equality that cemented groups was preserved over generations despite the disruptive forces. Consequently, the rise of leaders who could manage both meaning and material wealth and link their success to supernatural power was impeded.26 Such privileged access to the spirit world has been proposed to be a key factor in the emergence of inequality (Asombang 1999; David and Sterner 1999; Godelier 1978, 1980; McIntosh 1999; Netting 1972; Ploeg 2001; Schoenbrun 1999; Southall 1999; Robertshaw 1999; Vansina 1990, 1999), even in the most ercely egalitarian societies (Kinahan 1991, 1999). A second powerful axis of equality was maintained with exchange partners outside the clan, usually kin, who were maternal or afnal relatives. Such equality, based on lifelong two-way exchanges of wealth, fostered cooperation and trust with relatives outside the group by removing competition and exploitation from the picture. External relations were regarded as fragile strands of a spider web, for they afforded economic advantage that could not be attained through home production. Moreover, they provided alternative residences in times of hardship and potential hosts for war refugees. Enga managers took full advantage of external relationships to secure wealth in social ties, the foundation for inequality. However, the very equality that facilitated the maintenance of such broad ties precluded centralizing labor and building wealth in people (Guyer 1995, Guyer and Belinga 1995, Miers and Kopytoff 1977). For example, had bridewealth been a one-time payment, ambitious men would have been able to convert wealth in pigs to wealth in people through high levels of polygyny (Illife 1995; Richards 1950; Vansina 1990:227; Uchendu 1965). But as it was, afnal kin insisted that their daughters receive as much land, labor, and wealth for lifelong exchanges from their husbands kin as would women in monogamous marriages. Consequently, prior to the colonial period, only the most gifted men could support two or three wives. Moreover, the principle of
26. A salient example of the separation between the sacred and the secular comes from the life history of Yakani Lambu, one of Engas most powerful Tee managers from 1930 to 1960. Prior to a Tee cycle, sacred vegetation on the Yakani ancestral site was felled by a rival in an attempt to bring the wrath of the ancestors upon Lambu and the Yakani clan. Upon hearing the news, Lambu went with his men to inspect the damage and found blood dripping from the deled tree. His response was a rather unheroic: Lets get out of here!
equality of afnes held for new immigrants. Immigrants were given land by the host lineage on the basis of afnal ties (Wohlt 1978) with the assurance that their children would become full-edged clan members. Hosts hoped for support from their relatives but in the face of equality could not establish relationships such as the primacy of the rst comer so critical to the formation of internal group hierarchy in Central African societies (Kopytoff 1999:89). Very signicant in relations of equality between clansmen and with afnes was the fact that coalitions to enforce equality were composed largely of men. Women who wanted to exert their rights had to do so indirectly by inuencing their husbands, turning to their respective kinsmen for support, or resorting to violent protest (M. Strathern 1972, Kyakas and Wiessner 1992). Women can be powerful watchdogs of inequality (Boehm 1999a), and in societies where men and women have roughly equal roles in enforcement inequalities are likely to have a much more difcult time taking root. Among the !Kung (Ju/hoansi) of today, it is women rather than men who are making the most signicant efforts to maintain networks of exchange (hxaro) and thereby ensuring the redistribution of wealth in the face of unequal access to wealth from male wage labor (Wiessner 2000). In the fascinating Iroquois case presented by Trigger (1990), it appears that the equality of women and their role in enforcing social norms together with a noncompetitive ethos may have led to quite a different complex political structure from that found among the otherwise somewhat similar Enga. A third powerful constellation of equality existed in the segmentary lineage system to maintain egalitarian relations among parallel social units. Whether large or small, clans were equal to all other clans in a tribe, subclans to other subclans in a clan, and so on. If their autonomy was challenged, allies often offered support. Equality of social units facilitated cooperation of brother groups in larger enterprises; it was defended to the very end. When wars erupted between parallel social units, the defeated either conceded a parcel of land or were displaced to reestablish themselves in a new territory or disbanded but never conceded to being subordinated to or subsumed by the victors clan. These dynamics, amongst others, inhibited the centralization of power (Lederman 1986, Roscoe 1993, Spencer 1990, Wright 1977) or the formation of a vertical hierarchy of social units (Friedman and Rowlands 1978). Continual jockeying for wealth and inuence on the part of parallel clans in the segmentary lineage system produced a pattern of rapid, uniform, and widespread land clearance that would be very distinct from the patterns of land use produced by centralization. These are but a few examples of how diverse ideologies and coalitions within egalitarian societies, played out under certain environmental conditions, will produce very different obstacles to the emergence of institutionalized inequality setting egalitarian societies off on trajectories that depart from what David and Sterner (1999: 99) have called the state-jacket sequence of
neoevolutionary theory for political evolution (Ehrenreich, Crumley, and Levy 1995; McIntosh 1999; Paynter 1989; Vansina 1990, 1999; Yoffee 1993). Exploring egalitarian structures as complex institutions that arose historically to reduce the transaction costs of exchange makes it possible to depart from neoevolutionary models without abandoning a more encompassing theoretical framework. By facilitating intercultural comparison, this framework should increase our understanding of the different courses taken by the enterprising and the diverse forms of social complexity emerging from the process. Despite the restrictions that egalitarian coalitions placed on developments in Enga society, by rst contact with Europeans Enga had taken important steps toward institutionalized inequality. A booming surplus economy had been generated, norms governing competition had been unleashed, the elite had a strong information advantage, and some families had much greater wealth in social ties than others. Precedents for inequality had been set in ideology and practical action. The potential equality of clansmen and afnes was still a widely held ethos, but the real differences were great. Although the large exchange networks were foundering by the time of rst contact, it is unlikely that their collapse would have been the end of the story. Up until contact, population growth had provided more opportunities than obstacles, but several decades down the road pressure on land would begin to be felt. The independence, equality, and autonomy of social units from clans to households depended heavily on the availability of land. With limits on land, the options of social units to maintain autonomy might have been severely compromised (David and Sterner 1999). Alternatively, predictions from an inuential Huli cult to the southwest (Ballard 1995, Frankel 1986, Wiessner and Tumu 2001), grounded in cosmological beliefs unfamiliar to central and eastern Enga, were spreading rumors that the world would end in a few generations. Had managers taken the portending doom from a foreign cult into their hands, they might have secured a more direct line to the supernatural. Circumstance had long provided Enga with opportunities to build new institutions. Managers in future generations would have these new ideologies and institutions as starting points from which to go farther.
Comments
shankar aswani Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93106, U.S.A. (aswani@anth. ucsb.edu). 1 xi 01 In this interesting and timely paper, Wiessner argues that egalitarian institutions in small-scale societies are designed to lower the transaction costs of making and keeping agreements in the exchange of goods and services among political players. She disputes Norths (1990) as-
sertion that transaction costs are lower in traditional societies, suggesting that they are in fact high because of the uncertainties created by exchanges among close kin. I disagree. Transaction costs are generally low when communities have (1) stability of relations, (2) multiplex relations, or repeated interactions across various social and economic spheres, (3) direct relations (e.g., without state intervention) and, most important, (4) shared beliefs and preferences (Taylor and Singleton 1993:199). Case studies from around the world show that nepotism and kin-related altruism via resource pooling, sharing, and cooperative territorial behavior are important among close kin who share high coefcients of relatedness and live near each other (e.g., Allen 1998, Gurven et al. 2001). Therefore, it is likely that communities sharing linguistic, cultural, social, and kinship afnities can more effectively reduce the negotiation, monitoring, and enforcement costs of exchange agreements than communities whose members are more socially and spatially dispersed and less likely to be socioculturally homogeneous. Because transaction costs are low in small-scale societies, it seems unlikely that egalitarian institutions would emerge to lower them. In fact, the contrary could be argued. An effective response to collective-action problems such as those outlined by Wiessner requires cooperation among political players and the development of coercive measures to punish potential free riders. Political players may allow free riding when resources are abundant or not perceived as scarce, but increasing environmental demands caused by changes in consumption and population variablessuch as the changes recorded by oral history and archaeology for a number of Highland groups prior to European contact and well before the Great Wars and Tee cycles emergedwould encourage the development of coercive measures to curtail it. The hegemonic rise of aggrandizers and their followers and the concomitant establishment of sociopolitical hierarchies best achieve this. Thus, the lowering of transaction costs would best be accomplished under a hierarchical political system. Why, then, would complex and costly egalitarian institutions arise among the Enga? Alternative hypotheses to explain the existence of egalitarian institutions in pre-European contact times are necessary. Another problem is that, because oral accounts cover only a short period of Enga history, it is hard to determine what came before the period covered by Wiessner without archaeological evidence. Political hierarchies and institutionalized inequality could have developed in the region well before the Great Wars and the institutionalization of the Tee cycle. Highland Papua New Guinea archaeology suggests that agriculture developed in the region around 9,000 b.p. and that the consequences of agricultural expansion included a population explosion and radical shifts in settlement patterns well before the sweet-potato revolution (e.g., Bayliss-Smith and Golson 1992). Large populations and multifarious economic and political opportunities for achieving status and power would have scrambled assurances of cooperation among
different social players, thus encouraging the rise of political hierarchies. The Enga egalitarian ethos encountered by ethnographers may have lingered in a context in which the occurrence of formal hierarchical institutions or parallel semiegalitarian ones followed a cyclical process, their rise and decline synchronous with the everrearranging political landscape and the social, historical, and economic context of the times. Studies of the archaeology and oral history of New Georgia suggest that not only was the rise of institutionalized hierarchies among the most conspicuous responses to changes in patterns of settlement and demographic parameters (e.g., Aswani 2000, Sheppard, Walter, and Nagaoka 2000) but also their degree of formalization varied across space and time and was cyclical in nature. The ethnohistory of this paper is rich and interesting. Readers may criticize Wiessner for using only ethnohistory to reconstruct the Engas past, pointing to the importance (and pliability) of contemporary narratives in creating shared social identities or in supporting claims to political legitimacy and autonomy from colonial and postcolonial orders. My problem, however, is not with Wiessners use of ethnohistory as history or her use of Enga genealogy to estimate the chronological sequence of events. Rather, I would criticize her failure to draw upon archaeological evidence (or even mention it) to complement the oral history she employs. The rich literature on Highland Papua New Guinea archaeology could help her substantiate her claims. This void is a weakness in her analysis and leaves her conclusions open to question. chris ballard Pacic and Asian History, Research School of Pacic and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia (chris.ballard@anu. edu.au). 28 xi 01 Wiessners collaborative research project with her Enga colleagues Akii Tumu, Alome Kyakas, and Nitze Pupu has provided us with one of the rst detailed accounts of historical transformations in a New Guinea Highlands society. This represents a considerable advance on previous strategies, which sought to reconstruct the past by juxtaposing contrasting social formations from ethnographic observations amongst different societies. The resulting trajectories for social evolution tended to betray the theoretical proclivities or narrowly regional perspectives of their authors rather than offer any insight into actual processes of transformation from one putative formation to the next. Oral history has been a sadly neglected avenue of research in the Highlands, and this is all the more regrettable because so many older Highlands women and men have experienced the transition from autonomous communities to colonial rule and then to independence within the span of a single lifetime. The thumbnail account of Enga oral history offered here only hints at the impressive and convincing detail of this teams major monograph (Wiessner and Tumu
1998), where the sheer weight of multiple strands of evidence negates at least some of the scepticism previously directed at attempts to reconstruct the precontact history of oral cultures. Perhaps the most salutary lesson of this project for anthropologists has been the demonstration of the evanescent quality of the institutions so commonly described in systemic and synchronic terms in regional ethnographies. The Enga tee exchanges are a case in point, as the oral histories now suggest that no two tee exchange cycles were alike. Rather, the tee, along with most other institutions, experienced continuous transformation as new materials, ideas, and networks of exchange were brought into its orbit. Perhaps it is the subtlety of her oral historical work that raises some doubt about the value of Wiessners choice of theoretical framework in this paper, however admirable her intention to engage with wider debates on political transformation. The focus on institutions, transaction costs, and the role of individual agents may reect Wiessners parallel research project among !Kung San communities but is curiously at odds with the latent critique of institution-based ethnography contained in the Enga oral histories. Certainly, the road to inequality which Wiessner describes for Enga is not so clearcut amongst their neighbours the Huli, on the southwestern margins of Enga territory. Huli oral history describes a presweet-potato system of hereditary leadership culminating, amongst those clans that owned key ritual sites, in closely knit and heavily intermarried families of ritual experts who wielded remarkable power over the entire Huli language community and even beyond the boundaries of Huli territory (Strathern [1993] signals the former importance of ritual leadership for the Highlands region more generally). The past two to three centuries of Huli history, during which there was an explosion in human and pig numbers similar to that described here for the Enga, witnessed a gradual democratization of leadership roles. Ceremonies were increasingly sponsored and ministered by a much wider range of players, who assumed a bewildering array of minor ceremonial ofces in rituals such as the tege. Similarly, the high degree of control over land and resources formerly exercised by hereditary clan and subclan leaders appears to have waned as individuals, irrespective of their descent status, established claims to land founded primarily on the principle of labour investment and on their individual managerial capacity to marshal that labour. Crucially, the situation of increasing monopolization by leaders of ows of information that Wiessner describes for postsweet-potato Enga society was also reversed amongst Huli as ritual knowledge, along with the capacity to monopolize regional networks of trade in material items such as salt and stone axe blades, ceased to be the preserve of the hereditary ritual families (Ballard 1994). One might even characterize this historical trend in Huli leadership as a shift from hierarchy to heterarchy, in a direction precisely opposite to that indicated for the Enga by Wiessner. This is not to say that forms of inequality similar
to those amongst Enga have not developed in postsweetpotato Huli society, which has seen the emergence of rich men (agali homogo) and occasionally rich women (wali homogo) as the pre-eminent brokers of social transactions. Yet inequality in Huli society has more often taken the form of competition between social groups within which a strongly egalitarian ethos guarantees a degree of solidarity, at least with respect to particular projects such as wars or major trading or gardening ventures. The Enga may not represent land shortage as a serious problem and rarely identify land as a proximate cause for wars, but oral histories of the Enga and Huli alike are replete with serial displacements of clans from their territories. It is on this larger scale of intergroup competition that an analysis of inequality in the New Guinea highlands might more productively be focused. christopher boehm 1047 A San Acacio, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501, U.S.A. (cboehm1@concentric.net). 1 xii 01 This article sets a new standard for the ethnohistorical treatment of political and economic processes in nonliterate egalitarian societies, and it addresses one of the great mysteries in political anthropology: How did egalitarian bands or (more probably) tribes evolve into chiefdoms with stratication and stable hierarchies? We lack a full, ethnographically documented processual sequence, but in the middlebetween egalitarian societies and chiefdoms with hereditary leadershiplies a fascinating intermediate-seeming type, the great-man or bigman society. Wiessner has provided us with a richly detailed case history that shows how such a society can change, before contact, toward more hierarchy. Normally archaeologists deal in environmental and demographic factors and grave goods provide a rough index to social stratication, but recently the disposition of power has become a focus (Earle 1977; see also Boehm 1999b) and social and economic organization are obviously relevant. Wiessner emphasizes all of these variables, along with religion and secular ideology. The underlying question is, How do we get from a vigilantly egalitarian group, one which sharply curbs individual political ascendancy, to a group which tolerates and appreciates strong leaders and, by making leadership hereditary, creates the basis for hierarchy among family lines? Tikopia (Firth 1936) can be taken as an instance in which egalitarian society has denitively transformed itself into a hierarchical society, and the Enga have become a weak chiefdom by the end of Wiessners story. But she offers us some importance clues about how things might have started in this direction. Her suggestive processual analysis is both detailed and well grounded ethnographically, but I have a concern about her views on whether egalitarianism came down from the Upper Paleolithic. This political approach involves the curbing of those who are prone to self-aggrandizement, and this is not mainly a matter of economic accumulation or of possession of raw power.
There is a phobia about one individuals treating another dominantly, as an essential nonequal, and I believe it to be ancient. Wiessner does not agree about the equivalence of todays mobile foragers with yesterdays, but I believe that the debate over this has been oversimplied. We know now that the Upper Paleolithic was accompanied by a great deal of environmental uctuation. Mobile hunter-gatherers were variegated 40,000 years ago just as they are today, and if in the face of all this variegation we can nd universal features or strong central tendencies today, it makes sense that they could be rather condently projected back into the Upper Paleolithic (see Boehm 1999a, 2000). On this basis, some baseline features of past egalitarianism would include an egalitarian ethos, an intention to prevent interpersonal domination at least among adult males of a band, cooperative division of favored large game, and the use of social sanctions by group members to prevent dominators or would-be dominators from gaining control of their groups over the long term. Going with this is a decision process based on group consensus, and much of this syndromethe political side of it but not the hunting or nomadic sideseems to have continued after domestication in very much the same form among tribal people. What is interesting about big-man societies is that the same ethos can be exibly applied to men who control great wealth, albeit ephemerally. One must keep in mind, as Wiessner and other students of New Guinea tribal life have made clear, that such control is gained in a cultural context of intergroup competition and that a big-mans prestigeful displays of wealth bring prestige to the entire group. Thus, individualistic self-aggrandizement is accepted because of the common benets it brings. There is still a vigilant group that is interested in the essential political parity of males, as is evidenced by the fact that big-men who become abusive are executed (Boehm 1993). Much more could be said, for this article is full of riches. The case made for transaction costs is interesting, and this adds an important variable to the search for the origins of hierarchy. In addition, the data are excellent and are published elsewhere in detail. This effort takes us one step closer to developing sounder hypotheses about how humans began to centralize everything, for it suggests a way in which the processes that led to state formation could have gotten started. john e. clark Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602, U.S.A. (jec4@ucs.exch. byu.edu). 21 xi 01 The most appropriate response to Wiessners superb essay should be to bend the knee and retire in silencebut this would defy all academic licensing requirements. As the only extant description for all the worlds cultures of a pristine development from egalitarian to rank society taken from the narratives of the participants themselves
rather than mythology, her article deserves to become an instant classic. That it is theoretically and analytically sophisticated is an added joy. Recovery of oral histories for the breadth and depth of Enga territories and their potato and piglet politics allows for a reconstruction of institutional changes and their linkages to motivated individual and group actions and the creation of new social values both for objects and for persons. Wiessners analysis also demonstrates the utility of new institutional economics (Ensminger 1992, North 1990) theory and analytical categories and procedures; her analysis of egalitarian societies also lls a void in this theorys conceptualizations of this stage of societal development (cf. North 1990). Most current explanations for the origins of social inequalities and privilege have failed to free themselves from the centuries of ironic and imaginative speculation that now shroud this issue. Wiessner sheds this philosophical dead weight by addressing the irony of egalitarianism, perhaps the most infamous malapropism in anthropology. The word conveys the impression that societies so designated operate on principles of equality rather than the inequalities rampant in all the rest. All societies, however, are riven with inequalities of various sorts, and society and family life would be impossible without them. Egalitarian societies are those that invest substantial resources and talk in pretending that inequalities are ephemeral and inconsequential. As Wiessner demonstrates here and elsewhere (1996, 2001), not all egalitarian societies are created equal, and their differences are structurally signicant. Egalitarian societies are neither simple nor the same; each requires tremendous energetic resources to maintain the social convention that each member be accorded equal treatment and access to critical resources. Relying on the concepts of the new institutional economics, Wiessner asserts that egalitarian institutions exist to lower transaction costs in exchange and are a measure of the efciency and complexity of these societies. The theory has further ironic implications for her analysis and for current conceptions of the origins of ascriptive inequalities. The knee-jerk equation of egalitarianism with simplicity derives from Enlightenment speculations concerning human nature and man in the original State of Nature. As mental constructs, pristine man and savage society were imaginary inversions and negations of civilized existence, and these images served as a mirror for gauging civilizations comparative progress. The savage in the mirror, however, has always been a false reection of a negated present. Egalitarian societies are not civilized societies stripped of all accessories; rather, they are viable social organizations with deep histories and prescribed practices of group cooperation in which individual agents act to reproduce traditional ways of life. At the level of agents and the prerequisites of personhood, all societies have interactional asymmetries and inequalities, and all are equally complex. The notion of complexity in anthropology makes sense only in making typological distinctions of scale and hierarchies of decision making, not with regard to the number of in-
teractions or relationships among constituent agents or groups in a society. From the perspective of New Institutional Economics, societies designated as complex represent dramatic simplications over their egalitarian predecessors. The chaotic complexity of single-order systems is a mathematical property of the potential number of relationships among individual members, which will increase by an additional factorial for each new member. With social systems based on ascriptive leadership and hierarchy, however, higher-order institutions for gathering and processing information and for enforcing informal and formal rules come into play. Hierarchical organization and decision making greatly reduce the transaction costs of social intercourse for the multitude and result in a rationalized, efcient system. As it turns out, complex societies are those that promote simplicity and simplifying institutions (see Yoffee 2001). Wiessner makes a strong case for the efciencies of egalitarian institutions and the costs involved in maintaining them. The power of her analysis would be enhanced were she to do the same for the new Enga institutions that promoted inequalities. Wiessner objects to most of the current models for the origins of social complexity on good theoretical grounds, and her detailed analyses of the Enga add weight to her views. Her historical reconstruction of the principal agents, their motivations, and the key institutions provides a compelling method for future analyses. The basic message is that all systems have a signicant history which cannot be ignored. One should expect, therefore, that individual cases around the globe of the transition from egalitarian to rank societies will vary in signicant ways from the one she presents. Rather than create imagined predecessors, our interpretive challenge will be to deal with the complexity of institutions, practices, beliefs, and incentives for real egalitarian societies and their changes through time. Achievement and social esteem from ones fellows are the road to renown, and from there nepotism is the road to rank and the true beginnings of social simplicity. As Wiessners work demonstrates, an excellent way to evaluate these changes is through an analysis that emphasizes property, institutions, ideologies, agency, and the structure of incentives. brian hayden Archaeology Department, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6. 19 xi 01 Wiessners analysis of the origins of inequality in New Guinea is fascinating and provocative. I agree that hierarchy is deeply rooted in human behavior. I also agree that examining transaction costs may be a useful way of understanding social institutions, although Wiessners discussion of this is largely programmatic and lacks any real detailed application in her ethnographic cases. I also agree that aggrandizers must initially persuade other community members to support schemes that seemingly will benet everyone and have argued that this leads to broadly based, heterarchical social structures used to cre-
ate inequality (Hayden 1995; 1997:115; 2001:24748). However, that aggrandizers must pretend to treat everyone equally does not mean (contra Wiessner) that they were not the main agents of the emergence of new institutions which clearly beneted them and led to socioeconomic inequalities. As Wiessner herself notes, the enterprising did gain some economic advantage by interpreting rules to their advantage. This is a key issue, and she seems to be contradicting herself on it. Indeed, it is strange to nd inequality portrayed as an inherent characteristic of humans but also as a product of communitarian dynamics in which self-interested agents play little or no role. Wiessners two examples of institutional change resulting from spontaneous events are hardly convincing arguments for aggrandizers not being essential elements in any or even most institutional changes. Given the arguments about the differential costs of the Great Wars, Wiessner indicates that these would probably have been abandoned eventually in any case, and spontaneous ritual female competition over men seems an almost insignicant part of a much broader institutional change (the adoption of bachelor cults). While I agree that egalitarian forces are major hurdles in attempts to create socioeconomic power, Wiessner goes too far in negating the role of aggrandizers. Initially everyone participating in the various schemes promoted by aggrandizers must perhaps be treated equally, but for such schemes to have signicant effects universal participation is not required. Wiessner notes that the Tee was initially endorsed by only a handful of people. Such differential participation entails inequalities in the society at large, especially where participants obtain advantages. By inequality Wiessner seems to mean institutionalized inequality such as is found in chiefdoms. In reality, major inequalities exist well before the chiefdom level of complexity. She also denes equality in Frieds (1960) terms of adequate availability of prestige positions and equal access to resources (at least in theory). This contrasts signicantly with the more archaeological definitions that focus not on the availability of prestige positions, egalitarian ethoses, or lip service to egalitarian ideals but on behavior and the ownership and distribution of prestige goods and/or debts within a society. While Wiessner portrays Enga society as egalitarian (at least within cooperating kin groups), there is and was private (individual or family) use of land, private ownership of products, private raising of domestic animals (representing surplus), differential access to exotic goods (shells, feathers, axes), competition over economic resources, and warfare for access to goods, land, wives, and prestige. None of these are common in real egalitarian societies. One must also wonder to what extent the sparse accounts of greater egalitarianism in remote times have suffered in transmittal or been remodeled to suit utopian or other political agendas. The traits listed above are aspects of what I and others have called transegalitarian societies. In the initial stages, transegalitarian societies are characterized by lip service to egalitarian ethics and public behavior to ob-
scure real inequalities in power and wealth. Ambitious individuals lure their supporters into schemes that must ultimately be rewarding for supporters at least some of the time. Thus, groups maintain egalitarian cooperative internal relations and heterarchical rather than hierarchical sociopolitical structures. Not all kinship heads are aggrandizers, but those who are create major changes in the direction of inegalitarian institutions. Ultimately, of course, these institutions do benet productive clans and households that adopt them, but they also create inequalities between groups and managerial positions that make it possible for aggrandizers to obtain more wives, more debts, and more inuence. These institutions are devised to cater in some way to aggrandizer self-interests (albeit channeled through a group of supporters). While Wiessner uses traditional anthropological notions of egalitarianism to claim that there are many varieties of egalitarian societies, I think it is clear that Enga society is a transegalitarian one. This may boil down to a matter of semantics, for we seem to be making somewhat similar distinctions, but if Enga do not qualify as a transegalitarian society one wonders if any society would. Wiessner suggests that Enga-type egalitarian societies may have characterized much of the Paleolithic, but, given the lower resource-extractive potential due to the simpler technology of the past (as well as the lack of prestige objects or any indication of wealth competition before the Upper Paleolithic), it seems that the Central Australian egalitarian model is a much more appropriate baseline. The idea of various structurally different types of egalitarian societies is an intriguing one, especially in explaining short-term historical changes, and I would like to see it developed further. In the long run, however, it has yet to be demonstrated that such details of history matter, especially given cases like the Enga, where, as Wiessner demonstrates, egalitarian constraints were eventually almost totally circumvented after the introduction of the sweet potato and powerful aggrandizers with chiey characteristics did emerge. ju rg helbling Ethnologisches Seminar, Universita t Zurich, Freiensteinstrasse 5, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland (j.helbling@access.unizh.ch). 21 xi 01 Wiessner shows us again how rewarding historical reconstructions in societies without a written history can be. Her reference to the model of new institutional economics demonstrates that this model helps to elucidate not only common-property management but also evolutionary processes of political change, but she does not exhaust its explanatory potential. She refers to institutions, ideology, and actors, but local groups are organizations with their own power and status structure, groups of individuals united to pursue common interests more successfully under given institutional conditions or to change those institutional conditions (Ensminger 1992:6). All organizations have to solve the problem of collective goods. The emergence of Tee exchange and
hierarchy within local groups can be more convincingly explained with the help of the concepts of organization and collective goods. Unoccupied land was still widely available in the 18th century, and population densities were low. War usually ended with the expulsion of the defeated group, and, accordingly, neighbouring groups were mostly allied groups. Allies were compensated for their losses and their support with land and meat. Trade in stone axes, salt, shells, etc., already played a certain role. The relationships between men were egalitarian, although Wiessner reports a heterarchy of ritual experts, cassowary hunters, warriors, and managers. As population growth and settlement densities increased, it became increasingly difcult to expel enemies after a war; alliances had to be enforced by compensating allies more lavishly, and later a postwar modus vivendi had to be found even with enemies. Tee exchange emerged not directly with increased competition for allies but with control of trade. It probably did not operate at lower transaction costs than alternative exchange modalities, but it denitely made more goods available at a given time and place. It was, after all, as Wiessner clearly states, a new way of nancing afnal and matrilateral payments as well as compensating allies. Its expansion was due to the military advantage it gave the groups which adopted it; organizations (local clans) were selected for the new institution (Tee) by a warlike environment. Organizations in warlike competition have to improve their chances of survival by forming alliances, but in recruiting allies they incur high costs in pigs. The pigs provided as alliance goods can be interpreted as collective goods, and therefore each group has to solve the problem of free riding in order to avoid a military disadvantage. According to Peoples (1982), the collectivegoods problem is solved in Maring society by privatization: families pay marriage gifts to their afnes and are in turn supported by them in wars. Among the Enga, however, local groups are exogamous patriclans. Most marriages are contracted between families of adjacent patriclans, but most wars are also between adjacent groups. Because the Enga marry their enemies, a divergence between individual and group interests emerges; allies cannot be recruited in the same way as among the Maring. This collective-goods problem can only be solved if men with power and high status take over. Meggitt (1974) has shown that a large proportion of the Tee pigs goes to the big-man, who gives them to the big-man of another clan to distribute. It is the patriclan which decides about war, peace, and alliance, and the big-man plays a central role in the foreign policy of his local group. Group members with loyalty conicts (i.e., with afnal relatives in the enemy group) cannot prevent a war but can only avoid clashing with their afnes on the battleeld. Big-men are political entrepreneurs with widespread regional networks and a following of servants and agnates within their groups. Because they take care of the provision of collective goods (pigs), contribute more to the recruitment of allies, and organize their compensation after a war in the interest of their
local groups, they are rewarded individually with positional goods such as power and status. Although each man maintains exchange relationships with men in other groups, the big-man makes them exchange their pigs in accordance with the alliance politics of the clan. As Wiessner shows, egalitarian ideology (between men) remains plausible even after powerful big-men have emerged because all men have the right to become bigmen and to invest pigs in political relations. One result of this competition between politically ambitious men is an increase in the total production of pigs as alliance goods. Another is the selection of the most suitable man for the job. The competition for positional goods within the local group is, thus, individual selection, which, however, depends on group selection by war. That Tee exchange considerably increased the quantity of alliance goods available is corroborated by the fact that it was widely adopted only when competition for allies increased. It was only when big-men (and inequalities between men) emerged that the problem of free riding and the divergence between individual and group interests was solved and thus transaction costs were reduced. Ensminger and Knight (1997) have presented a model for analysing the complex relations between actors, institutions, and organizations: (1) Self-interested actors propose new institutional solutions for new problems. (2) Bargaining takes place as institutional change is connected with changes in the political structure of organizations. (3) Finally, selective advantage in the competition between organizations gives the new institution an edge. mitsuo ichikawa Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan (ichikawa@jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp). 12 xi 01 Most studies on the emergence of hierarchical societies focus mainly on the conditions for institutional development; few have empirically shown how inequality developed from an egalitarian society. Wiessners study is an important contribution, since it describes how institutional inequality emerged from the interaction between agents and structure in a particular historical and ethnographical context. According to her, some of the competing individuals in the Enga society introduced and promoted, by forming group consensus and satisfying group interests, institutions for exchange such as the Tee cycle and thereby established themselves as leaders. While I am not in a position to discuss the validity of her analysis in the ethnographic context of the New Guinea Highlands, I will comment on the idea of egalitarian societies on which her argument is based. Wiessners argument has two premises: that egalitarian structures are not a slate of simplicity but complex institutions which . . . have arisen to reduce the transaction costs of exchange in small-scale societies and that egalitarian coalitions vary . . . in conguration, composition, scope, and nature . . . producing a wide
variety of paths to . . . inequality in different societies. I support the rst half of the rst point. Anthropologists have often characterized egalitarian societies in terms of minimal politics (Woodburn 1979) or the absence of institutions (Ingold 1999), but this feature is often the result of efforts to prevent the development of a hierarchical social order through institutional means that may be rather elaborate. African hunter-gatherers, for example, use a variety of means to achieve egalitarian social relationships. One of these is the frequent exchange, or lending and borrowing, of hunting tools. Since the owner of the kill is the owner of the tool with which the prey was immobilized, this exchange helps to spread out the ownership of kills, which would otherwise be concentrated in a few skillful hunters. The equality is maintained largely by an institution of ownership that distinguishes the owner from the hunter who actually kills the animal (Ichikawa 1991, 2001). I am reluctant, however, to support the idea that egalitarian institutions reduce transaction costs. While in a hominid-evolutionary context extensive food sharing (an important aspect of egalitarianism) probably had an adaptive value in reducing the risk of an uncertain food supply, food sharing in modern egalitarian societies seems to be motivated by other social factors, which explains why it persists even after they have acquired other means, such as storage and credit, of coping with uncertainty. Moreover, detailed studies of food sharing (Kitanishi 2000) show that food is also frequently shared with nonrelatives, on whom people have less information, thus increasing transaction costs. While the Enga may have succeeded in reducing the transaction costs of extensive exchange networks by strengthening their leadership, egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers does not always reduce costs because sharing is not a form of exchange (Woodburn 1998). As for the second point, Wiessner distinguishes strict (or prototype) egalitarian societies like those of African hunter-gatherers from societies like the Enga that permit a certain degree of competition and takes the latter as a starting point for examining the development of institutional inequality. In fact, a prototype egalitarian society may be seen as polar type any divergence from which faces a strong reaction in terms of the existing egalitarian norms. Incremental changes toward inequality are usually difcult in such a society. Nevertheless, there are always some individuals who work, procure, and give more than others do. Such variation in individual competence and personality naturally occurs in any human society, whether egalitarian or not. In contrast to the situation among the Nambikuara (Le vi-Strauss 1955), in an egalitarian society there is no consensus among group members to assign leadership to such a person. Germs of inequality are always present, but they are negated, sometimes by elaborate means such as the distinction of the owner from the hunter just described. While African hunter-gatherers use this means to achieve egalitarianism, in other situations it may facilitate institutional inequality. In fact, Central African farmers often lend guns to Aka hunter-gatherers and con-
trol the ownership of the kill. Thus the institution developed in the rst situation may be used for quite opposite purposes in the second. There is therefore a possibility that inequality may emerge even from prototype egalitarian societies through the interaction of agents, egalitarian structure, and exogenous events, though it may take a different path.
inequalities based on age, sex, and ability. The transformation of such societies towards more inequality may in part be based on those pre-existing differentiations. I am therefore inclined to analyse the institutionalization of inequality in terms of transformations of inequalities rather than as a shift from one category of society to another.
anton ploeg Center for Pacic and Asian Studies, Nijmegen University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 6 xi 01 Wiessner and Tumus (1998) book Historical Vines signicantly advanced our knowledge of the recent prehistory of the New Guinea Highlands. Therefore it is fortunate that Wiessner now addresses some of the broader issues raised by the splendid body of data on which that book is based. Reviewing the past 250400 years of the Enga past, she concludes that the Enga had taken important steps towards the institutionalization of inequality by the time European intruders arrived, despite the pervasive egalitarianism of their way of life. The period covered was one of far-reaching sociocultural change prompted in part by the introduction of the sweet potato. In my view the trend towards institutionalization of inequality was less clear-cut than Wiessner makes out. Major institutions such as the Great Wars and the Tee emerged and blossomed in the period covered, and Wiessner makes it clear that they offered scope for social advancement and the consolidation of inequality. However, the Wars were discontinued, and the Tee had become unwieldy and seemed on the verge of breaking up. As far as the Great Wars are concerned, Wiessner points out that in opting for the Tee cycle Great War leaders made a fatal error for the institutionalization of leadership. In the Tee some men had far better access to information about exchange opportunities than others, but the breakup of the cycle may well have reduced the access differential and so have inhibited the consolidation of inequality. Wiessners idea that social inequality is deeply rooted in human behaviourgiven the hierarchy prevailing among non-human primatesand the corollary that what she describes is the re-emergence of inequality seem useful to me. Here too I would qualify her statement, pointing out that the ethnography of tribal societies shows the ubiquity of arrangements by means of which the great majority of men can marry and/or have legitimate offspring. Is there reason to suppose that these arrangements are recent in the evolution of human societies? Her main point, that egalitarianism is not the product of simplicity, seems unexceptional to me. It is the notion of egalitarian society that seems questionable. It sets up a category of societies seemingly contrasting with inegalitarian ones, but, as she points out, none of the socalled egalitarian societies is undifferentiated, and she includes among egalitarian societies those harbouring
p a u l ro s c o e Department of Anthropology, University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469-5773, U.S.A. (paul_roscoe@umit. maine.edu). 23 xi 01 Wiessner is quite right that recent theoretical developments concerning the emergence of inequality have paid insufcient attention to the recursive interaction of structure and agency. Perhaps, as she suggests, egalitarian society has been taken to constitute a slate of simplicity, but the poverty of detailed, long-term data on the subject is surely also to blame. Archaeology furnishes data that embrace long periods of time but are notoriously crude for gauging the intricacies and consequences of political action. Ethnographic eldwork can provide the ne detail of these processes but seldom for more than a decade or two and never entirely uncontaminated by recent colonial and global processes. Wiessners project is important because it uses a remarkable, almost unique ethnohistoric data set to probe in considerable ethnographic detail more than two centuries of precontact Enga political process. What Wiessner achieves is impressive. My main reservation concerns aspects of long-term political process that she leaves largely unconsidered. In depicting egalitarian and hierarchical institutions and ideologies as instruments for reducing transaction costsas economic structures, in effectshe sidelines the political nature of the practices that generate inequality and overlooks a more fundamental process that underlies surface processes such as the appearance of the Tee and the Great Wars. Wiessners principal focus is the managerial (or voluntaristic) aspects of the emergence of political hierarchy. Applauding the managerial model for its thesis that inequality can take root only when a population stands to gain real benets from stronger leadership, she describes, for example, how Enga managers established their ascendancy by hitching their political wagons to institutions like the Tee and the Great Wars that reduced transaction costs to the benet of all. Nothing to quarrel with there: any astute political entrepreneur will promote a socially benecial innovation if it can be played to his or her advantage. It must be emphasized, though, that would-be leaders will seize on any resource that allows them to build power relations (inequality), including, to the extent that they can get away with it, innovations that do not advanceindeed, may disadvantagepublic benet. To the east of the Enga, contact-era Chimbu big-men had established cadres of henchmen
that they could deploy to advance their agendas through fear (Bergmann 1971:195). Throughout New Guinea, bigmen also created information-gathering and -disseminating networks that allowed them superior control of semantic frameworks and permitted them to distort information to their advantage. By judicious dissemination (or outright concoction) of tales of enemy infamy, for instance, they might fan wars that advanced their interests over others (see also Sillitoe 1978:25354). It is unclear whether Wiessner would disagree. To give the complexity of political-evolutionary processes its due, though, it follows that we must attend to the locus of this power creationleaders, followers, and the interactions among them. Would-be leaders are drawn from one end of a human bell curve. Through idiosyncrasies in their biology or their enculturation, they have strong ambitions to be leaders, and to become such they must be more astute than their fellows in comprehending the structure of their society and how to make it work for them. Making use of these qualities, they attempt to build power relations by manipulating this structurethe material, social, and symbolic capital available to them. To be sure, all followers manipulate leaders just as all leaders manipulate followers, but leaders become the leaders because they are better at the game. The crucial point is that this manipulation necessarily involves interaction. In pre-European societies like the Enga, all interaction is face-to-face, all locomotion by foot. Under these circumstances, increases in population density become vital in facilitating interaction and permitting the politically gifted to augment their power and consolidate it over time in institutional structurers (Roscoe 1993). The reason the !Kung are so egalitarian, I think, has less to do with an egalitarian ethos or their capacity for egalitarian rebellions than with the unavoidable fact that there are simply not enough hours in the day for a would-be leader to build a signicant power base when to do so necessarily involves interacting with and manipulating people who are scattered across a desert at no more than 1 person/km2. When the emergence of leadership is so constrained, ethoses are going to be egalitarian and rebellion easy. Contrast the !Kung situation with events among the Enga: Partly in response to the introduction of the sweet potato, Enga population rose dramatically: Wiessner and Tumu (1998:5556, 38788) estimate a growth from 10,00020,000 around 1770 to 150,000 in 1980. The concomitant increases in density must have greatly reduced leaders transaction-travel costs in building inequality. Underlying the surface processes by which Enga leaders institutionalized inequality, in other words, was a deep process rooted in a phenomenal enhancement of the potential for interaction and political manipulation as population densities rose in the wake of the sweet potato.
frank k. salter Max-Planck-Institut fu r Verhaltensphysiologie Human, Von-der-Tann-Strasse 3, D-82346 Andechs, Germany (salter@humanethologie.de). 21 xi 01 As Wiessner notes, theories of political change are weak in describing and explaining the endogenous processes that caused the transition from egalitarian to hierarchical societies. The problem is acute for our understanding of the cultural evolution of political institutions, which cannot advance very far without behavioural analysis. Wiessners paper helps change that. In particular, it lends support to and demands a modication of one approach to understanding political evolution, social technology theory. According to this theory, social forms, including institutions, are constructed from the innate human behavioral repertoire in a limited number of combinations according to the speciess evolved biogrammar. The engines of growth in social technologies have been population growth following the Neolithic Revolution, humankinds polytechnic intelligence (Caton 1988), and cultural evolution under economic and social selection. While drawing on the full gamut of behavioural disciplines, the theory has its origins in anthropology (Reynolds 1973, Fox 1971), sociology (Tiger and Fox 1989 [1971]), political science (Caton 1988, Geiger 1988), and, most fundamental, human ethology, the subdiscipline dedicated to documenting the speciess behavioural repertoire and working out combinatory rules (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1972, 1989, 2001; Fox and Fleising 1976). Social technology theory has been applied to such phenomena as legitimation (Geiger 1988), the political history of the commercial republic (Caton 1988), indoctrination (EiblEibesfeldt 2001, Salter 2001), and command hierarchy (Salter 1995), but despite its anthropological and ethological origins it is ethnographically underdeveloped. Wiessners paper makes a strong start toward lling this empirical gap. Wiessner addresses a vexed problem of biogrammar, one not of parsing but of the technicalities of writing paragraphs: how did hierarchical societies emerge from egalitarian ones? She documents the role of human social designs, their unintended consequences, and the accumulation of the resulting institutions across generations in one culture, the Enga of Papua New Guinea. One social technology described by Wiessner, the trade in cults, is particularly instructive. Acceptable means for introducing a cult to a clan were a necessary condition for the cult to cause change. Cults were purchased from other groups by leaders and introduced on a trial basis. This exemplies the broader point made by Wiessner that whatever institutions were introduced to this assertively egalitarian society must have been acceptable to group members. The description of the diffusion and modication of cults among the Enga deals with the choice of cults based on perceived efcacy in changing behaviour, their sometimes unintended consequences, the process by which new cults were imported and tested by a clan, accompanying training by religious experts, asymmetries in information, and sometimes a rudimen-
tary division and inheritance of the tasks involved in social control. Viewed as a stage in political evolution, one can see how these factors could lead to hierarchy. Wiessners description of the processes and motives of managers adds vital behavioural detail concerning cultural group strategies (Soltis, Boyd, and Richerson 1995). The group strategies represented by new institutions were not purely self-promoting strategies installed by self-aggrandizers but largely intended to benet the group. New institutions arose . . . when individuals, usually clan leaders, recognized the potential in spontaneous events, discussed these with fellow clanspeople, and attempted to frame them into more formal institutions to address group problems. Wiessner describes grades of punishment used to control free riders and selfaggrandizers, which are critical to any theory of group strategizing (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1982, Boyd and Richerson 1992). Wiessner makes the important point that egalitarian societies are governed by institutions that act to maintain equality: Egalitarianism is the outcome of complex institutions and ideologies created and maintained by cultural means which empower a coalition of the weaker to curb the strong. However, she presents no evidence to support her contention that egalitarian coalitions vary as greatly in conguration, composition, scope, and nature as hierarchical power structures. Providing such evidence would entail a survey of political technologies in hierarchical and egalitarian societies, which, as far as I am aware, has not been attempted. Social technology theory has not paid sufcient attention to issues of agency and unintended outcomes. Wiessner offers ndings, theory, and methods for advancing our understanding of the behavioural dimension of political evolution. kazuyoshi sugawara Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Kyoto University, Yoshida Nihonmatsu, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan (sugawara-kazuyoshi@k4.dion.ne.jp). 21 xi 01 Wiessners paper is a new contribution to the anthropological effort to solve the enigma of egalitarianism. It is surprising that an anthropologist can so thoroughly reconstruct 250 years of the economic-political history of a nonliterate society by analyzing oral tradition. In this respect, this paper demonstrates the power of historical ethnography. Wiessners most ambitious goal is to grasp the tension between agency and structure. However, the detailed comparisons among the eastern, central, and western Enga do not succeed in depicting a clear image of this tension. I would like to point out four interrelated problems: 1. Egalitarianism is a complex system which integrates different layers of social lifepolitics, economy, social organization, values, and ethics. Each layer is ultimately realized and negotiated through everyday face-to-face interactions. Agency needs to be examined primarily at
this level. A birds-eye view of the major changes in the economy is apt to miss the indigenous reality in which the Enga experienced cooperation, competition, coalition, and so on (all of which are Western interpretive terms). Although Wiessner claims that actors choices are often not rational, she describes the acts and choices of the Enga mostly in transactional terms as if they were dispassionate agents. In order to understand the nature of competition, it is indispensable to complement transactional interpretation with more detailed analysis of the spontaneous events that shed light on the dynamic aspects of emotional life in egalitarian societies, for example, ambivalence between envy of and respect for the leader. 2. Wiessner chooses a society that tolerates some competition and moderate inequality as a more appropriate starting point than a prototypic egalitarian society such as the !Kung San. This choice, supported by the assumption that most humans, past and present, inhabited richer environments than the Kalahari, leads to the theoretical marginalization of the San societies. But what does she mean by a rich or a high-risk environment? There is no independent criterion for judging any ecological setting rich or poor. One can only evaluate the balance between the carrying capacity of the environment and the growth rate of the human (or animal) population inhabiting it. More curiously, Wiessner fails to refer to many works on the African Pygmies, another prototype of radical egalitarianism in a contrastive environment. Her argument implies that the prototype of egalitarian societies had been compelled to negate competition by environmental pressure. If some innovation in subsistence allows the surplus to be used for exchange, then an irreversible process begins through which the disposition to competition is released from repression. In other words, Wiessners formulation of the emergence of inequality is achieved at the expense of elucidating the origin of prototypic egalitarianism. 3. On this point the theory proposed by Junichiro Itani (1988) deserves to be considered. Itani admits that most primate societies are based on fundamental inequality, but he also pays special attention to signs of conditioned equality embodied in various types of primate social interaction, for example, play, greeting, and food sharing. He argues that a profound fear of civil inequality is prevalent not only among hunter-gatherers but also among various African pastoralists and slashand-burn agriculturalists. Agreeing with Itanis insight that the orientation toward equality is deeply rooted in human evolutionary history, I doubt that moderate inequality is the most appropriate starting point for the elucidation of egalitarianism. 4. Norths denition of institutions as the rules of the game is the most unintelligible aspect of Wiessners theoretical framework. In what respects do the rules of the game differ from mere rules? According to Searles speech-act theory, which distinguishes constitutive rules from regulative rules, the game is the most representative activity governed by the former. However, the rules governing the Great Wars, the Tee cycle, spirit cults, and
so on, cannot be regarded as constitutive rules, in which tautological denitions of all possible acts must be embedded. It is more likely that Norths theory is a version of game theory, as Wiessner quotes his argument about players trying to maximize wealth. But the validity of game theory is usually based on the assumption that players adopt the optimal strategy within the constraints of preestablished rules. The possibility of changing the rules cannot be derived from this strategy, because it requires a higher logical type. Thus, when Wiessner writes, The rules of the game were changing, it sounds like empty rhetoric. The plausibility of her historical analysis would not be damaged if the metaphor of the game were eliminated.
Reply
polly wiessner Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A. 11 xi 01 I thank all of the commentators; some substantive issues have been raised, and certainly my future work has been cut out for me. I will begin my reply with a few points about terms and categories. Ploeg and Hayden question my denition of egalitarian societies. No wonder, for, as Clark aptly remarks, egalitarianism is perhaps the most infamous malapropism in anthropologyall societies sport some inequalities. I include as egalitarian societies with age and sex differences because I know of no societies without such distinctions. People of different ages or sexes in all societies pursue different social, economic, and reproductive interests; what constitutes inequality and what constitutes different interests can be difcult to distinguish. I agree with Ploeg that the transformation of inequalities in a society is inuenced by preexisting differentiation by age and sexcoalitions which enforce equality are often formed along the lines of age and sex. Ploeg queries my conceptual separation of achieved inequalities and institutionalized inequalitieswhether the two are distinguished by more than degree. I feel that there is a signicant qualitative difference between the two. Once inequality is institutionalized, the enormous amount of energy expended on scheming, putting down rivals, leveling, or deciding whom to support is reduced. Institutionalized inequality should also curb the competition that fuels runaway surplus production. In response to Hayden, I chose Frieds concept of egalitarianism because the arguments I am advancing require no further categorization. Assurance of equal access to resources and status positions and the repression of interpersonal dominance is achieved by institutions that reduce the transaction costs of social and economic exchange in small-scale societies. Whether some individuals do better than others within these institutions and receive recognition for their achievements does not alter this role of egalitarian institutions. I did not use
the term transegalitarian because in their original formulation Clark and Blake (1994:18) equated transegalitarian societies with emergent chiefdoms. To use transegalitarian would be to subscribe to the neoevolutionary sequence and to write an end to a storythat Enga would be transformed from an egalitarian society into a chiefdombefore the story ended. Boehms suggestion that humans have an ancient phobia against one treating another dominantly is fundamental. Actually, he misreads me hereI too suggest deep roots for egalitarianism in the introduction, as does the evidence of the primatologist Itani summarized in Sugawaras comment. Boehms proposal is further supported by Salters (1995) ethological analysis of the distribution of emotional expression across seven organizational types in Australia. His results indicate that institutional hierarchy is constrained by the human behavioral repertoire because humans have an aversion to subordination. Thus, with the formation of hierarchy, superiors usually soften their commands or pose them as suggestions or requests. Such measures lower resistance to command, leaving the hierarchy intact at the level of policy formation. The deeply rooted aversion to dominance pointed to by Boehm (1999a), Salter, and others (see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989) is a disposition that would greatly facilitate the evolution of egalitarian institutions to foster cooperation. Moreover, Salters urban ethology suggests that hunter-gatherer societies are not the only research sites for exploring such questions and that anthropologists have much to gain by applying their methods to the study of the full gamut of modern populations. Aswani disagrees that transaction costs are high in small-scale societies on the grounds that such societies have stable relations, repeated interactions, direct relations, and shared beliefs and practices. But I would argue that these features of small-scale societies ourish precisely because they are facilitated by egalitarian institutions. Many shared beliefs and practices are the product of egalitarian institutions and ideologies; equality avoids the offense of dominance discussed above, which would lead to unstable relations; direct and repeated relations are facilitated when dominance does not threaten face; and interactions are more likely to be repeated when relations of dominance and submission do not threaten or offend. I would agree with Aswani that kinrelated altruism plays an important role in cooperation (Wiessner 2002), but cooperation in human societies extends far beyond the bounds of relatedness which would have signicant genetic payoffs. My response to Ichikawa is similarthat information on nonrelatives is standardized by egalitarian institutions, lowering the costs of social and economic exchange. I appreciate the insights presented at the end of Ichikawas comments. Aswani argues that it is hard to determine what came before the period covered by Wiessner without archaeological evidence, but perhaps it is even harder to determine what came before given the available archaeological evidence! The three major archaeological excavations in Enga indicate that the area was inhabited for more than 10,000 years (Bulmer 1975, Kobayashi and
Hayakawa 1971, and the unpublished excavations by Jo Mangi at Kutepa Rock Shelter). Sites are located at altitudes ranging from 1,300 to 2,300 m. None of these sites has yielded information relevant to presweet-potato land use, settlement patterns, or social inequalities. Pollen evidence from Birip in the mid-Lai Valley collected by Walker and Flenley (1979) has been interpreted by Golson (1977, 1982) as indicating that forest clearance began around 4,000 b.p., most likely as a result of tarobased agriculture. Recovery of forest taxa from around 2,0002,500 b.p. may indicate more intensive agricultural practices; an increase in casuarina pollen at 1,200 b.p. may suggest tree fallowing. More we do not know. Oral traditions suggest that presweet-potato agriculture was intensive in eastern and central Enga but that intensive pig production in the pursuit of economic or social advantage did not begin until well after the introduction of the sweet potato. If one moves away from Enga to the rather different environments of the Kuk site near Mt. Hagen, excavated by Golson (1977, 1981, 1982; Golson and Gardner 1990), or the Haeapugua Swamp, near Tari (Ballard 1995, 2001), excavations and pollen analysis have revealed changing patterns of land use which are very difcult to interpret in terms of changing social and political factors. Inferred social and political conditions behind changing patterns of land use for Kuk have been rewritten over the past three decades to t ethnographic evidence or in response to changing theoretical perspectives in ethnography (Ballard 1995:appendix A1). To use interpretations based on the 20th-century ethnographic situation in the Kuk area to establish a presweet-potato baseline for Enga would involve circular reasoning. Only when more archaeological evidence is available will we have some idea of what went before the period covered by historical traditions. Aswanis own work in New Georgia is impressive and enviable for its use of oral and archaeological sources. It provides a fascinating basis for interregional comparison. Sugawara makes the excellent point that a birds-eye view of major changes is apt to miss the reality of Enga experiences. For this reason, in Historical Vines we did include substantial appendices with translations of original texts. It is indeed a priority to go on to carry out a ne-grained analysis of audiotapes and examine these in light of the social technology theory outlined in Salters comment. However, before transactional interpretation is undertaken, the strengths and weaknesses of using historical testimony and traditions for this purpose must be evaluated. Historical testimonies, couched in symbolic speech, often do not portray a given situation from both sides, and this means that they are less amenable to transactional analysis than records of live events. Ballard presents an intriguing contrast of trajectories of change between the Huli and their Enga neighbors, and the Enga-Huli difference summarized by Ballard is not a construct emerging from different theoretical takes of researchersBallard and I have actively exchanged and compared material since 1990. The Enga themselves recognize that ritual power increases as one moves westward, with the few powerful ritual experts
who exist in Enga living along the Enga-Huli border. The displacement of ritual authority by political and economic entrepreneurs after the introduction of the sweet potato does not appear to be unique to the Huli (Strathern 1993, Modjeska 1991). What I would question in Ballards summary, however, is that there existed a tight relationship between ritual and economic power to the extent that Ballard claimsthat hereditary ritual families monopolized regional networks of trade. In a very stimulating article, Ballard (1994) shows that through the Dindi Gamu cult, Huli ritual experts managed to enshrine the central position of the Huli, who are otherwise poor in trade goods, in the regional circulation of ideas and materials; ritual roads were trade routes. But he does not provide any evidence to support the claim that certain families of ritual experts held a monopoly over the trade or that they were wealthier than others. Nothing in early Enga historical traditions concerning Huli traders or the work of Mangi (1988) on Huli trade suggests that long-distance trade could not be undertaken by anybody who chose to do so. Much remains to be worked out regarding the relationship between ritual and economic power in highland New Guinea prior to rst contact with Europeans. As Harrison has demonstrated for the Avatip in Sepik, practice in ritual hierarchy and everyday life may not be closely linked; the two may be alternative forms of social action. Roscoe feels that I sideline more fundamental processes of agency on the part of political entrepreneurs. I do not intend to underestimate the efforts of gifted managers in bringing about change, but I wonder if it can be assumed that would-be leaders in kin-based societies want to seize on any resource that allows them to build inequality even if their actions bring disadvantage to kin. Support of kin is one of the highest values in highland New Guinea societies and one of the pressures that leads to misappropriation of government funds today. Nasty moves and motives are directed at threatening rivals or competing groups, not clan brothers. Although leaders are indeed drawn from one end of the bell curve, people do not have to be at the high end to recognize when their rights as equals are being violated. A threat to the rights of one group member is often perceived as a threat to allleveling coalitions form rapidly. I am sympathetic to Roscoes arguments about density, except for his ideas about the !Kung. (!Kung engage in daily exercises to maintain equality within villages [Lee 1993, Marshall 1976, Wiessner 1996].) Enga elders cite population increase as a signicant force behind change on two accounts. First, an expanding population brought new opportunities for exchange. Second, institutions like the egalitarian clan meeting, in which individual interest is evaluated in terms of clan goals (Sackschewsky, Gruenhagen, and Ingebritson 1970), were too cumbersome to organize complex exchange networks. More hierarchically organized institutions were required as the economy grew in scale. Enga openly state that the rise of the great kamongo (big-men or managers) and new forms of symbolic communication went hand in hand with the development of more hierarchical institutions.
What is interesting, however, is that as population density increased, managers had to go farther aeld to form ties that would allow them to assemble more wealth at one place and at a given time. Just prior to contact, Teecycle managers walked the paths of Enga for a year or more to organize a Tee cycle because the labor of those in nearby clans could not be exploited to fulll the managers ambitions. Relationships of equality would have to be ruptured before aspiring men could make the most out of density. Both Clark and Helbling bring up the very legitimate criticism that my analysis would be enhanced by further use of the new institutional economics to elucidate the construction of hierarchical institutions as the economy grew in scale. I must admit that even though I nd concepts from institutional economics very productive for understanding institutions, I have had difculty in applying its models to account for the complexities of the Enga case. I am still working on it. Helbling lays out a very stimulating scenario in which he accounts for the emergence of Enga inequality in terms of individual selection of big-men dependent on group selection by war. Intergroup competition via warfare did play a crucial role in Enga history. It set off the population movements that spurred the development of the Tee, Kepele, and Great Wars; it motivated the import of cults; it eventually required the extension of war reparations to the enemy; and it provided one force behind the growth of the Tee cycle. All of these developments gave managers opportunities to gain inuence. But I have reservations about attributing the development of institutionalized inequalities solely to intergroup competition via warfare. First, there is no evidence that Enga warfare was driven by scarce resources essential to clan survival. Second, motivations of warriors often did not conform to group projects. Some individuals fought in response to the triggering offense, some for the entertainment, some to settle old grudges or take revenge, some to make a name in battle, some to make a name or forge new ties in peace settlements. Intergroup competition was often brewed in the interest of individual goals (Sillitoe 1978). Third, ties with maternal kin and, to a lesser degree, afnal kin were sometimes as strong as clan tiescooperative organizations crosscut clan boundaries. Fourth, Enga historical records do not portray warfare as the singular driving force in history, and the content of Enga bachelors cults, ancestral cults, and other rituals do not revolve around achieving advantage in warfare. Finally, selection for the highest tier of managersTee-cycle organizers and Great War leaderswas as dependent on external as on internal support. For example, to launch a successful Tee, managers had to elicit condence and cooperation from men in some 200300 other clans. Great War leaders were not only approved by their own sides but also summoned by their opponents to come forward and organize intergroup competition between pairs of tribes. In the Great Wars, neither of the opposing sides gained resources vis-a ` -vis the other by winning or losing. The bulk of the wealth acquired by managers was not applied to clan needs but passed on to key partners in other clans
or tribes, particularly to maternal and afnal kin. In short, group selection via warfare was far less important for the rise of the great kamongo who managed regional affairs than for local leaders. And it was for the great kamongo that leadership began to be institutionalized. Certainly every author has wondered Did I really say that? in reaction to statements processed by commentators. Here I would like to clear up two points that I do not intend to make. First, I am not suggesting that inequality is a product of communitarian dynamics in which self-interested agents play no role as Hayden proposes. I am merely arguing that those who pursue selfinterest with no communitarian considerations often have a quick, brutal demise. Second, I did not intend to portray Enga as a weak chiefdom, as Boehm suggests in passing, or to describe the institutionalization of inequality as being clear-cut as Ploeg and Ballard imply. As Clark and Blake have noted (1994:19): Any transition to a non-egalitarian system requires the emergence of new practices as a necessary prelude to structural change. And these must be maintained and nanced long enough to make practices habitual. Owing to accelerating competition and a wealth of natural resources, new institutions were changing too rapidly or were not practiced for long enough for the inequalities they generated to become habitual and truly institutionalized. Though Enga had taken important steps toward institutionalized inequality by rst contact with Europeans, it is by no means certain that in the long run they would have developed into a society with stable, institutionalized hierarchical inequalities.
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CAPTURING IMAGINATION: A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO CULTURAL COMPLEXITY

Carlo Severi Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
With few exceptions, it has been assumed that the production of a generalizing anthropological theory of human cognition must necessarily entail a reduction of ethnographic complexity. No case-centred analysis has been offered to show that a cognitive approach to cultural complexity is possible. In this article, I want to show that a different cognitive perspective can improve our understanding of ethnographic facts and help us critically to revise a number of traditional anthropological concepts. In order to do so, I will discuss the example of a messianistic religious movement born among the Western Apache of San Carlos and White Mountain (Arizona).
From a logical point of view, a theory can be either powerful (accounting for a limited number of features valid for a great number of cases) or expressive (accounting for a great number of features belonging to a limited number of cases). In other words, theories can be extensionally or intensionally orientated.Any case-centred inquiry (for instance, a clinical study) is in some measure intensional, while any comparative or statistical analysis tends to be extensional. With few exceptions, attempts to produce generalizing theories of human cognition have thus far been carried out primarily in extensional terms. Researchers have been looking for ever more ethnographic cases which may conrm the assumptions of the theory, and make it more powerful. It is generally admitted, in this perspective, that, in order to use an ethnographic case in this framework, a reduction of the ethnographic complexity is necessary. The objection of many anthropologists to this approach is that complexity is precisely what characterizes ethnography. Those holding this view regard any attempt to reduce this complexity as something that must fundamentally alter the object of the analysis, creating such a reductionist outcome as to rule out the possibility of either conrmation or negation of the point at issue. In this article, I wish to show that a different cognitive perspective, developed in intensional terms, can enrich our ways of dealing with ethnographic complexity and help us to rethink a number of traditional anthropological concepts. In order to do so, I will discuss the example of a messianistic religious movement that came into being among the Western Apache of San Carlos and White Mountain Reservations around the year 1916. Before I move on to the analysis of this case, let me state briey the general hypotheses I have been developing in my recent work (Boyer & Severi 19979; Severi 2002) on the role of memory and pragmatics in cultural transmission.
Royal Anthropological Institute 2004. J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 10, 815-838
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On salience, counterintuitivity and tradition

Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer have assumed that the success of an idea or a representation in a culture is essentially a consequence of its counterintuitivity (Boyer 1994; Sperber 1985; 1996). In their view, counterintuitivity which Boyer has dened as the transgression of a number of ontological features rooted in human cognition is what gives a representation its psychological salience. More precisely, Boyer has argued that the cognitive optimum resulting from a certain combination of counterintuitive and intuitive assumptions generates a specic kind of cultural salience. This type of salience, in turn, is supposed to account for the persistency in time and/or for the rapid propagation in a community of a given representation. There is no doubt that this new approach has given a strong impulse to research in this eld, and it has also generated a new understanding of the relationship between cognition and culture. From the logical point of view, however, this approach is a paradigmatic case of a powerful theory that signicantly lacks logical expressiveness. In many situations, to achieve a successful representation one needs more than simple salience (even when it appears, as Boyer has remarked, against a background of intuitive representations). Actually, counterintuitive mental representations can be very fragile. Since the time of Freud (1991 [1899]), it has been widely recognized that the experience of dreaming is full of counterintuitive representations that do not last. While individual dreams can constitute the psychological basis of culturally successful narratives (see, for instance, Fausto 2002 or Stephen 1982), dreams are usually rapidly forgotten. Their content is consequently very difcult to propagate in a community. Conversely, culturally successful notions can be fully intuitive, in both religious and non-religious contexts. In fact, such notions can be neither intuitive nor counterintuitive, but simply meaningless. This is often the case for religious traditions implying the use of mana concepts, like shamanism. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Severi 1993a), in many American Indian shamanistic traditions a number of central concepts, usually translated as soul, shadow, double, and so on, possess no denite meaning, and are always surrounded by a halo of uncertainty. The semantic content of these concepts is never fully understood, or positively represented by people. This is why the semantic analysis, and a fortiori etymological speculations, are not sufcient for understanding the position they occupy in the tradition. To understand them it is not enough merely to reconstruct a network of related ideas, as mirror image, vital energy, character, and so on. We also need to reconstruct the pragmatic conditions that dene the kind of language game in which they are used. In fact, the persistence in time, and success, of notions of this kind are not explained by their counterintuitive content, but rather by their insertion within very precisely dened, and yet counterintuitive, contexts of ritual communication (Severi 1993a). A good example is offered by the Kuna ritual recitations of shamanistic chants, where the enunciation of obscure words does not imply the intention to convey a meaningful message to the patient, but tends to construct an acoustic mask, indirectly dening the nature of the shaman-chanter (Houseman & Severi 1998). In these cases, one can fully account for the successful propagation of a representation by referring only to the nature of the context of communication in which these representa-
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tions are propagated. This conclusion suggests that cultures make some representations more memorable than others by inserting them in counterintuitive contexts of propagation. In many important situations and religion is one of them a culturally successful representation is a counterintuitive representation formulated within counterintuitive conditions of communication (Severi in Boyer & Severi 1997-9). From this hypothesis, it follows that, in order to achieve a better understanding of such cases, one needs to build a more expressive theory of cultural propagation. One needs to understand this process in positive terms, and in specic situations. Such an attempt is certainly at the heart of the theory of modes of religiosity, as proposed by Harvey Whitehouse in several books and articles (e.g. Whitehouse 1992; 2000).1 His distinction between doctrinal and imagistic religious modes, which is obviously based on the distinction between semantic and episodic memory, has proven to be very useful in a number of cases. Like all useful distinctions, however, it invites one to think further, and it raises many questions. Since the efforts of generalizing the theory of religious modes have been as in the case of other cognitive-based approaches conducted only in extensional terms, one of these questions concerns the degree of complexity that can be accounted for by the theory that is based on this distinction. Consider, for instance, a situation characterized by the simultaneous presence of different modes of religiosity. On a number of occasions, Whitehouse has recognized that, in many cultural situations, we can see the two modes, imagistic and doctrinal, acting together or even merging in a single religion. However, what about the possible conict between the two modes within a single tradition? Does the theory account for a contradictory situation where some aspects of the culture are laid down in an imagistic mode, and others in a doctrinal mode? How could one interpret such a situation using the modes of religiosity approach? Before engaging in any empirical analysis, let us take a step further and ask whether (and how) this modes of religiosity theory might be able to account for the relationship between different cultures, or between different religious traditions. Clearly, a specic form of complexity may result from the contact between different cultures where either of the two typical modes of religiosity is to be found. Can the theory help us in understanding the struggle between competing religions in a single society, or in a specic historical period? This case is obviously very frequent. Ethnography very often shows that no simple traditions exist, and that some kind of contact between competing religious approaches is the rule rather than the exception in many human societies. What happens then when we try to analyse in these terms not a single religion, but as for instance in messianistic movements the interaction between two different religious traditions? I think that, even in this context, the distinction between imagistic and doctrinal modes of religiosity can be helpful. However, in order to understand cultural complexity, one has to take two further steps. First of all, one has to use the distinction within the context of a single culture in order to assess, and not to reduce, its specic complexity. Secondly, one has to take into account not only the kind of memory which is implied in the propagation of cultural representations, but also the pragmatics of cultural communication. An obvious case, in this perspective, is ritual communication, which is performed through both action and speech. In a book devoted to the study of
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ritual action, Michael Houseman and I have claimed that one of the essential clues for understanding the context of ritual communication is the way in which, through the establishment of a particular form of interaction, a special identity of the participants is constructed (Houseman & Severi 1998). In the example we have analysed, the Naven (a transvestite ritual of the Iatmul of Sepik, Papua New Guinea), the study of a rst interaction between a mothers brother acting as a mother (and a wife), on the one hand, and a sisters son acting as a son (and a husband), on the other, has led to the analysis of a series of rites involving larger social groups, where competition between men from Egos maternal side and mothers from Egos paternal side plays a critical role. One of our conclusions has been that the identity of each participant is built up, within the ritual context, from a series of contradictory connotations (being, for instance, at once a mother and a child, a sisters son and a wife, etc.).This process, of symbolic transformation realized through action, which we have called ritual condensation, gives to the ritual context of communication a particular form that distinguishes it from ordinary life interactions. In this article, I wish to extend this approach to the case of the paradoxical construction of the enunciator, which characterizes many syncretistic (or nativistic) movements. In my brief analysis of the example of West Apache messianism I will therefore try to keep an eye not only on the salience of religious notions (or symbols, or ideas, etc.), but also on the contexts in which these symbols are communicated. I will claim, in short, that in addition to the element of semantic counterintuitiveness which is present in these situations, there is also a pragmatic counterintuitiveness, and that this is something which must be taken into account in the analysis of complex religious traditions like messianism.
Messianism: intense propagation and paradoxical identication

Messianistic movements are particularly interesting for an anthropological theory based on the propagation of representations, because they generally show an extraordinary intensication of this process. These new religions, which usually possess what appears to be a rather simple body of doctrine, spread very rapidly and tend to convert entire populations in a short period of time. Why is this so? It is clear that prophetic movements are almost always linked to a situation of deep distress and intense political conict. It has been often remarked that in these cases religion becomes an instrument of resistance typically against colonialist domination. Classic cases include the so-called cargo cults of Melanesia (Kaplan 1995; Worsley 1968), the Hauka movements of the Songhay in Niger (Stoller 1989), the Ghost Dance of the North Amerindians (La Barre 1972; Linton 1943; Mooney 1896), and the socalled Ashaninka messianism of the Peruvian Amazon (Veber 2003).Yet their potential for inspiring or expressing resistance does not in itself explain their extraordinary effectiveness. There is no very obvious reason why the established traditional religions could not have been even more effective as a source of inspiration for those seeking to resist the encroachment of white intruders. The rapid diffusion and enthusiastic response of new adherents that are so
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widely said to typify prophet-led nativistic movements are clearly products of the novel forms of religious practice which arise in response to the new message or teachings proclaimed by the cult leader. Speaking of the Apache naildo dances, one of the more striking Ghost Dance rituals of the Amerindians, Goodwin and Kaut have remarked that the religious movements seem to have been successful only when an important medicine-man has been able to capture the imagination of the Apache, and in each case some innovation was necessary to do this [my emphasis] (1954: 386). Why do prophetic movements so often generate a change in the eld of religious practices, and what kind of change is generated in these situations? One interesting point concerns the content of these religious representations. In many messianistic movements, the contact between different sets of beliefs (for instance between Christianity and some other, usually traditional, religion) is obviously a central cultural theme. However, it is remarkable that, within the new messianistic doctrine, the combination of many different, or even antagonistic, cultural traits is almost without exception presented as forming a consistent and harmonious vision of the world. No contradiction is seen, for instance, between the Christian faith and the Voodoo rituals in Haitian syncretistic movements. As one of the informants of Alfred Mtraux (1972) once said to him, one needs to be a good Christian to be a good voodooist. This attitude is also very common among Amerindian Ghost Dance believers: it has been reported many times that Apache, Sioux, or Paiute believers saw no harm in simultaneously practising the nativistic, the Christian, and the traditional shamanistic religion. Actually, these newly founded religions, though often described as cultural hybrids, are not characterized by dramatic changes in religious doctrine. They typically present another striking phenomenon, which does not belong to the semantics of the indigenous discourse, but instead affects the pragmatics of communication: the appearance of a paradoxical I, personied by the Prophet himself. Thus when an Amerindian Shaman-Messiah comes forth to proclaim her or his new religion, he or she would typically declare to be not only comparable or similar to Jesus Christ, the son and the human incarnation of the God of the Christians; very often, he or she would claim to be the real Son of (the Christian) God, and sometimes even the only one. None the less, even though such new self-denitions may be expressed in Christian terms, they are still not seen as overriding or supplanting those previously accorded to the shaman-leader. On the contrary, they are often taken as a powerful, if paradoxical, conrmation of his prior identity, or even as an enhancement of it. The most impressive case is that of the founder of all the North Amerindians Ghost Dances movements, the Paiute prophet Wovoka, who spent his entire life in the Mason Valley of Western Nevada. From 1887 to 1889 he is reported to have experienced his rst revelations, which were soon spread by a great number of disciples through all the Plains tribes. Most of the so-called nativistic movements among the Amerindian populations of the western United States are thought to have originated from the teaching of Wovoka and his followers. As reported by the American ethnologist Mooney (1896: 771-4), Wovoka declared that he had been taken up into the spirit world, where God had given him a message to convey to all his people. He
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taught that the day was at hand when the dead of all the Amerindian nations would live again on earth in the full ower of their youth. Their resurrection would be accompanied by the return of all the great game animals which had been wiped out since the advent of the whites, and he also pledged that a great cataclysm would obliterate the white invaders (Mooney 1896; Overholt 1974: 42). An important part of Wovokas message concerned the nature of the Prophet himself. The document known as the Messiah letter explicitly indicated that Wovoka and Jesus were to be regarded as the same person: Do not tell the white people Wovoka is reported to say But Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again . . . (Mooney 1896: 773). As Overholt has demonstrated, the subsequent denials offered by Wovoka to James Mooney (1896: 773) were only attempts to hide his new identity. Many of his Indian disciples continually referred to him as the Christ, and several of them mentioned having seen the marks of the crucixion on Wovokas hands and feet (Overholt 1974: 44). In a document reported by Mooney the new Christ is explicitly identied with the old one:
In the beginning, after God made the earth, they sent me to teach the people, and when I came back on earth the people were afraid of me and treated me badly. I found my children were bad, so I went back to heaven and left them. I told them that in many hundred years I would come back to see my children My father commanded me to visit the Indians on a purpose. I have come to the white people rst, but they are not good. They killed me, and you can see the marks of my wounds on my feet, my hands, and my back (Mooney 1896: 796-7).
Assuming that Mooney has reported accurately on this, then Wovoka the messianic prophet is being treated as the Christ. Consequently, to become a believer in the new religious message is not, for instance from the point of view of someone recently converted to Christianity, a way to cease to be a good Christian. On the contrary, it is to become a real (and often the only real) Christian. We shall see that this was the view of the many converted Indians who joined the nativistic movements at the end of the nineteenth century. However, it was then clear to everyone, as it is now, that in the context of the Ghost Dance a statement like I am a real Christian (or even I am Jesus) does not mean I belong in whatever position I nd myself to the religion preached by the Whites. The meaning of such a statement is rather that it is because I claim that I am a real Christian that I am, more than ever, a member (or even a founder) of an anti-Western religion. To be similar implies here, very specically to be different, and even very different, from the traditional Christian religion. In other words this is a paradoxical situation where To be similar to you is to be me as opposed to you, and vice versa. The transition from the traditional religion to the messianistic one actually entails a move from a situation in which the local non-Western medicine man opposes the shamanistic tradition to Christianity because he claims it to be different, to a situation in which he or she opposes the shamanistic tradition to Christianity because he or she claims it to be similar. The transformation that seems to be operated here, often loosely called by anthropologists a contradiction, or a symbolic inversion, may be more precisely described as a paradox. In fact, a contradiction is found in a statement where two contrary predicates are afrmed. A paradox emerges only when a logical link is established between two contradicting predicates. If the statement this box is black
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and white is a good example of contradiction, we are facing a paradox only when the statement takes the form: If this box is white, then it is black (Sainsbury 1988; Tarski 1956 [1933]). A similar logical link between contradictory self-denitions lies at the heart of the Shaman-Messiah statement. In fact the new prophets message goes beyond the statement of a contradiction, and takes the form: If I am similar to you, then I am different. The result is a characteristic way to dene a new subject, the Messiah, who seems to possess contradictory features, and therefore to be able to enunciate paradoxical statements in the form To be me is to be you. Anthropologists have generally oversimplied this process. Too often, it has been interpreted either as a simple imitation of the Western religion, or as a non-authentic invention of a new tradition. In such cases, anthropologists have generally been concerned to show that the new religious movement is lacking in authenticity, with much attention being paid to illustrating its non-traditional character. What a Shaman-Messiah such as Prophet Wovoka presents as truly traditional is then easily recognized as a modern (and thus non-authentic) invention. My own view is precisely the reverse of this perspective. I seek to show that, in the case I explore here but also in all the nativistic movements I can think of to enunciate such paradoxical statements is to be perfectly faithful to the local, non-Christian tradition. We will have to conclude then that, at least in these cases, it is a mistake to look at these new religions as cultural hybrids. But to reach this conclusion we must focus on the right level of abstraction, taking into account not just the semantics of the messianistic discourse, but also the pragmatic conditions of its propagation. Our starting point will be the public pronouncement of a new religion by Silas John, an Apache Indian born in 1887 in the Fort Apache Reservation (Arizona). In 1916, Silas proclaimed himself a messiah and began to preach. Some years after, he
attracted a sizeable crowd, and informed them that, although his rituals were to be performed on Sundays mornings, like the one of the local Lutheran Church, his religion did not require that he speak from the Bible. Holding up a cross on which was drawn the gure of a snake, he said that this was the image the Apache should follow (Kessel 1976: 167).
By 1920, it was apparent to him that his acceptance as religious prophet was assured, and he then selected twelve assistants to circulate among the Apache people, pray for them, and encourage them to congregate (Basso & Anderson 1975: 29). At the nal stage of his predication, following what I have called a process of paradoxical self-denition, Silas John told his Mescalero Apache disciples, who still called him Yusen (the Creator in the Apache mythology, or Life Giver): You have to accept Jesus. Call me Jesus, not Yusen (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 294-5). In these years, Silas Johns movement proved extremely successful among the White Mountain and San Carlos Apache. After 1920, it spread to the Mescalero Apache of New Mexico, and led to the establishment of a new ritual, called Holy Ground prayer, which was rapidly adopted by members of the community, and became the signal of a general revolt against Christianity among the Western Apache. It was clear to everybody including the military authorities of the reservation that to produce such a
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statement as Call me Jesus was a particularly sacrilegious way to oppose Christianity, not a way to surrender to it. The Superintendent of the reservation forbade Silas John from attending dances or holding them, and clearly stated the reasons for this action: I have told Silas and all the Indians here that I do not object to them keeping up to some extent their ancient rites and tribal teachings but that I would not permit any of the young men to start new religions (Davis cited in Kessel 1976: 157). The typical pattern of any nativistic movement desperate trouble, political conict, and the announcement of a new religious message are present in the Apache situation. The Teaching of John, as the movement has come to be called, is precisely what I mean by a case for which it is not sufcient to point to counterintuitive representations (as conventionally dened, that is, on a semantic basis) to account for the cultural propagation of ideas. To understand the propagation of Silas Johns counterintuitive message, it is necessary to identify the pragmatic conditions of communication in which it was communicated. As we will see, only an interpretation of his new ritual involving a sequence of ritual actions and the recitation of a new prayer will account for the rapid spread and widespread acceptance of his teachings. For the moment, let us briey recall the historical and ethnographic context of the Silas John message.
Apache nativistic movements: a brief description

Over a period of less than forty years, the sequence of prophet-led millenarian movements among the Apache shows a clear process of evolution from a situation in which opposition to Christianity took the form of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion, to one in which we see the situation which I described earlier as opposition on the basis of similarity. In 1870, after a period of severe and prolonged warfare between Apache and US Cavalry forces, a number of Apache groups (White Mountain, San Carlos, Chiricahua, Cibecue) were conned to the White Mountain and San Carlos Reservations in Arizona. At least four new religious movements were reported among these groups, all of them led by so-called medicine men (Apache warrior-shamans). The rst started in 1881, when a shaman named Noch-ay-del-klinne held a series of ceremonies to raise the dead and bring back the old leaders for a joint uprising with the Chiricahua against the US Army (Goodwin & Kaut 1954: 387). This ascetic, slight medicine man, who was so pale as to seem almost white (Thrapp 1988: 217), had some knowledge of Christianity, but, after a period of doubt, rejected it explicitly. In 1871, the authorities of the Reservation still described him as a kindly White Mountain herbal doctor of 26, a dreamer and a mystic, widely known as a healer, but not as a dangerous one (Thrapp 1988: 217). Noch-ay-del-klinne was then sent to Santa Fe to attend school. There, writes Thrapp, he absorbed, but hardly understood the elements of the Christian religion and was particularly impressed by the story of the Resurrection (1988: 217). Soon after his return to the Apache reservation, this rustic dreamed his way into the subconscious of his people, arousing them to a fervour of devotion and trust (1988: 217).
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By June 1881 Noch-ay-del-klinne had become the centre of revival-type Apache gatherings. His message appears to have been much like those imparted by the leaders of other Ghost Dance movements, in particular its promise that the dead meaning dead Apache warriors soon would return. The meaning of this return was by no means ambiguous. In order to establish his new religion, Noch-ay-del-klinne used a typical imagistic method. He taught his followers a peculiar new dance, a variation of the traditional Wheel dance,in which all the performers face a central focus, aligned outward like the spokes of a wheel, and dance a forward-backward time step, irregularly, so that the wheel slowly revolves (Haley 1981: 336). To perform that dance, promised Noch-ay-del-klinne, was an effective means to restore to life two Apache chiefs, and in particular one of them, a recently deceased chief known as Diablo (Haskedasila, or Constantly Angry, in Apache). He pledged that this would have the effect of driving out the Whites. In a vision, he had dreamed that the white-eyes would be gone when the corn was ripe (Haley 1981: 337). As Kessel writes (1976: 63-4), a journalist named Connell was able to record his words:
Are we not natives to the earth around us? Are we not part of the forest, the rocks, and the air? Do not the birds sing, for the Apache? Is not the deer part of our lives? Do not the bodies of our ancestors lie beneath the earth that belongs to us? Why then do the Whites come hither? Why do they kill our game? There was only one brave among the Apache who could keep the whites back, Diablo, and the chief. His spirit hovers amid the rustling pine; the uttering leaves indicates his presence. The wail of the mountain-lion and the roar of the bear tell you that he is near. He will come again, not in spirit, but in the esh, to deliver us from the hated whites. Diablo guards our interests, Diablo seeks a remedy, and Diablo will live again. In the dance we seek an inspiration. With rhythmical movements, we commune with the spirits. The dance inspires passion, faith, fury, bravery and strength. Is it not I, who revives the message at the resting place of the bones of Diablo?
According to Kessel, after a certain number of attempts, Noch-ay-del-klinne did try to resurrect Diablo by dancing directly on his grave:
One White Mountain Apache woman who was born in 1908 learned from an eyewitness that a dance was held over the grave of one of the dead chiefs. The chief had been buried in a shallow grave covered with a blanket and a piece of canvas on which he had placed his personal belongings and a covering of rocks. Noch-ay-del-klinne removed the rocks, grave goods, and canvas until the blanket was exposed. The burial then became the centre of the dance (Kessel 1976: 70).
Noch-ay-del-klinnes message had caused great excitement in the reservation, and the intense fervour that these ceremonies reportedly evoked among the Apache soon alarmed the local authorities. In fact, the new dance taught by Noch-ay-del-klinne was spreading very rapidly from one village to another, and it had the effect of establishing a new solidarity between the rival bands of Apache who were conned together within the same reservation. The local cavalry commanders recognized immediately that the new ritual was a
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potential political threat. It was particularly worrying both to the civil and the military authorities that Apache who had been recruited as army scouts and Indian Agency policemen had allegedly been caught up in the movement and were reported to have become uncooperative and sometimes belligerent, openly grumbling against white mastery of their homeland (Haley 1981: 337). We cannot follow the story of this rst Apache movement in detail. It will sufce to say that the movement started by Noch-ay-del-klinne was seen as a serious threat, and was violently suppressed by the US Army, who killed Noch-ay-del-klinne and many of his followers.This is how John Bourke, who was at the same time an ofcer of the Army and an ethnographer working for the Department of Anthropology of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, describes the end of Noch-ay-del-klinne:
This Apache medicine man exercised great inuence over his people at Camp Apache, in 1881. He boasted of his power to raise the dead, and predicted that the whites should soon be driven from the land. He also drilled the savages in a peculiar dance This prophet or doctor was killed in the engagement in the Cibecue canyon, August 30, 1881 (Bourke 1993 [1892]: 55).
It is clear that this rst religious movement is still very chronologically close to the war between the Whites and the Apache, which had ended only a few years before, a cruel conict that was far from being forgotten. The political content of the return of the dead announced by Noch-ay-del-klinne was transparent to all the actors. To capture the imagination of his followers (to use Goodwin and Kauts [1954] expression), the rst of the Apache prophets had only some vague references to the story of the Resurrection. He himself never imitated any Christian practices, and he operated as a medicine man. He possessed, in particular, the snake-lightning power (Goodwin 1969 [1938]: 35; Kessel 1976: 59), and the dance he taught was an unmistakable variant of a traditional Apache ritual. Noch-ay-del-klinnes movement, then, still expresses an unambiguous opposition to Christianity. When Noch-ay-delklinne narrates his dreams or invites people to join in his new dance, he speaks in the name of the Apache shamanistic tradition. Syncretism is virtually absent from his doctrine. After Noch-ay-del-klinnes death, a number of Apache medicine men among them Big John (Ferg 1987; Goodwin & Kaut 1954) tried to continue his movement and to follow his main teachings: the performance of a new circular dance spread from village to village between 1903 and 1907. The search for a contact with the realm of the dead, under the form of the Sky and the People of the Lightning, was at the centre of this new ritual, called Dahgodia (they will be raised up). In the words of Big John to his followers: You will be raised up from the earth in a cloud, and while you are gone the earth will be changed. Then you will be lowered on to it again, and it will be all ready for you (Goodwin & Kaut 1954: 393). The implication was, obviously, that the Whites would soon disappear from earth. The end of the Noch-ay-del-klinne movement, and of his attempt to resurrect the old chiefs of the Apache war, had been tragic, but the death of the Prophet himself had been full of dignity. This time, the result of the attempt to make the Whites ritually disappear was to be crueller. Daslahdn,
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one of the medicine men involved in the movement, claimed to be able to travel to the realm of the dead, and to come back alive three days later. A Resurrection from the dead, again, was to be performed. But, this time, it concerned the new Prophet himself. Neil Buck, an Apache believer in the movement of the Raising up told the story of Daslahdn and the medicine men who were with him as follows:
We must have danced four or ve years in this new way, but nally we quit it because all the medicine men who ran it died. Daslahdn was the rst to die: he felt that he could return from the dead and had his followers cut his head off so that he could prove it. But it never came true. They all died, so everybody got scared and quit. Big John was the only one left (cited in Goodwin and Kaut 1954: 393).
With Big John, some new customs are established. Some of them are characteristically paradoxical: the believers in the new dance have to wear white garments, in a strictly traditional Apache manner. Among these dresses, a new symbol appears, which combines the cross with a form similar to a crescent. As Big John, like all his predecessors, possessed the snake-lightning power, it is highly probable that this form can be associated with one of the most important powers of the Apache, the snake. Big John performed lightning song, which he taught to other medicine men (Goodwin & Kaut 1954: 399), and his dance was perceived as a snake-dance (Goodwin & Kaut 1954: 400). In Apache symbolism, the power of the snake is obviously closely linked with the People of the Lightning, which is one of the ways to designate the realm of the Dead. It is not impossible that this association was already established at the time of Noch-ay-del-klinne. As early as 1884, Bourke himself had seen crosses associated with snakes:
The sign of the cross appears in many places in Apache symbolism. This sign is related to the cardinal points and the four winds, and is painted by warriors In October 1884, I saw a procession of Apache men and women, led by the medicine-men bearing two crosses They were decorated with blue dots upon the unpainted surface, and a blue snake meandered down the longer arm (Bourke 1933 [1892]: 29).
In these two new versions of the return of the dead movement started by Noch-ay-del-klinne, some of the symbols have changed, but the identity of the prophets has not. Big John, like Daslahdn and all the other prophets, is a traditional medicine man. After the failed resurrection of Daslahdn, he retires to a remote village. Simply acknowledging the failure of his power, he surrenders his ambition to attain the Sky and lead the Apache there. When Silas John appears, and announces his new prophetic message holding up a cross and snake, he is certainly referring to this recently established tradition of the Apache prophetic movements. His gesture refers, in particular, to the snake-dances performed by Big John. Silas is also a medicine man, and he too possesses the snake-lightning. In his teachings, he uses a range of features typical of the forty-year-old messianistic tradition started by Noch-ay-del-klinne: the snake, the cross, the return from the dead, the travel to the clouds, the white robes, and songs. For instance, the story of one of his miracles, involving the magical transformation of a drum into a living
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being, was recounted to Ruth MacDonald Boyer as follows by his Mescalero Apache followers:
Silas converses with God. He sees angels, angels with wings, dressed all in white. Silas has thirty-two kinds of medicines. Everything listens to Silas now, even the clouds. He can bring a dead man back to life. They say he has a drum. He just put this drum on the ground and it beats by itself when Silas talk to it (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 152).
However, this time, things have changed radically. Far from trying to defend the old tradition against the teaching of the missionaries, Silas John has begun to act as a typical paradoxical I. At the beginning of his career as a messiah, he strictly follows the pattern of a shamanistic Apache initiation: he wanders in the forest, eating no food, and looking for the vision of a gan, a traditional Apache animal spirit. From 1904 until 1916, Silas learned all he could about the snake-lightning power. His rst vision involves the encounter with one of these Spirits of the Mountain, the gans. And it is precisely a lightning that teaches him his personal songs:
Silas John was carried to a place where the earth was made, and where time began. It was a white mountain with a black cloud over it. From the cloud a supernatural being came to Silas John and informed him that he would become a prophet This being also taught him his prayers (Kessel 1976: 163).
The supernatural lightning is obviously related to the snake. Silas sees snakes in his vision, and establishes himself as a shaman possessing the snake power:
Silas John told me that a snake visited his house in 1913. It wouldnt go away. So Silas decided to put some beads on its neck. He did that, and the fourth time he did that, the snake left for good When Silas was in heaven, the Spirit said: You had a visitor. I am going to show you this visitor. They went to a green spot where there were sixtyfour snakes. They all stood up. Pick out the one you put the beads on said the Spirit (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 153-4).
The gan dances, where a signicant sequence of symbolic relationships between the snake and the lightning is ritually displayed, are one the most important rituals in Apache society. These dances are a ritual way to establish and keep alive the relationship with the animal spirits that provide for a number of powers needed by Apache men and women. Gans can appear in dreams and visions, and teach people their power. As Basso has clearly stated, this communication with the spirits has the effect of establishing a code of behaviour between the animal and the person who is granted his power:
Apache say that the surest way to maintain effective contact with a power is to accord it the same courtesies customarily extended to human beings. For instance instructions given by a power, however onerous, should be carried out without complaint or suppressed ill feeling. When making requests, a power should be addressed politely and spoken to in a low tone. (1970: 39).
However, when eventually Silas John experiences the vision of a powerful spirit and is taught a number of shamanistic chants specically related to the
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power of snakes and lightning, he prohibits precisely the ritual devoted to the gans, and replaces it by his own prayer. Old Man Arnold, one of his rst Mescalero disciples, reported one of these prayers, where it was not the gans but Jesus himself who was remembered as one of the cosmological founders of the universe:
When the earth was made, when the sky was made In the very beginning, they walk around with Jesus (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 149).
According to Old Man Arnold, this new way to describe the origin of the world caused perplexity among Silass followers:
It troubles me that Silas doesnt like the Crown [= gan] Dancers. He said their dances belong to the devil and do harm. That is hard to understand for me because I know their blessing have helped our people. But I guess we should follow the prophet (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 149).
As we have seen, when Silas decides to display a visual representation of his movements supreme being, he exhibits a cross on which a snake is painted:
The people from Campo Verde, Mescalero and both Arizona Apache Reservations gathered to be cured and to watch the much publicized snake medicine man at work. The dances were held on Sundays and between 500 and 600 Indians were in attendance. Silas John made a large cross from plywood, the vertical piece about ve feet high. On this was painted a large serpent with its tail at the bottom and its head just below the point at which the crosspiece was attached (Kessel 1976: 172).
In this representation, the snake is made to be Christ and Christ is identied with the snake. Both are Apache and Christian. Later, Silas also started to claim that God had chosen the Apache, not the Jews, as his elected people. As Old Man Arnold stated: The Silas cult is better for the Apaches than the Dutch Reformed service. Since the Jews crucied Jesus, the Apache have become Gods favoured people.That is what Silas has said (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 295). Finally, when his ritual which one might think of as having been created as an act of resistance to the Christianity of the soldiers and missionaries attracts a growing body of adherents, Silas enjoins his followers to call him Jesus. This series of apparent paradoxes leads to the same conclusion: Silas the shaman has become, for his disciples, Silas the (new) Christ:
The prophet is Silas John He started to preach about three years ago on the Fort Apache Indian reservation. Lots of those folks listen to him now. He is a great orator. He has power, just like the medicine men of the old times. And he tells the Indians to live good lives he tells them to stop their ghting and gambling He knows all about Christianity and says we should listen to what it says in the Bible. He says our medicine men are no longer enough. We should turn to Jesus (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 143; see also Henry n.d.).
From a supercial point of view, this careful blend of Apache and Christian belief and symbolism (Goodwin & Kaut: 1954: 388) may seem to
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be irretrievably disjointed and incoherent. Yet as we know, Silass teachings became a widespread and enduring element of Apache belief and practice. In order to explain why this was so, we must reconstruct the shamanistic background of his training and then understand what changed in the process of contact with Christianity. Let us, then, recall some general notions of the Amerindian shamanistic tradition based on the ritual recitation of chants.
The plural enunciator: Kuna and Apache shamanisms

The Kuna tradition offers a particularly clear example of this kind of shamanistic recitation, which is widespread among the Amerindians. This tradition involves the recitation of chants which are used to treat illnesses, accompany rites of passage, and impart various kinds of magical power. In the anthropological study of ritual symbolism, much attention has been devoted to the various ways in which language, as it is used in ritual performances, transforms the usual representation of the world, and constructs its own truthuniverse. A typical way to do this in Amerindian shamanism is to establish a metaphorical link, a set of analogies, or a group of mystical relationships between ritual objects and living beings. A striking example of this is to be found in the Mu-Igala, a Kuna shamanistic chant devoted to the therapy of difcult childbirth (Holmer & Wassn 1953), where the baby coming out from the body of the mother is progressively transformed into a hybrid being, called the bleeding pearl (or bead). Let us follow briey the phases of this transformation, without referring in detail to the text of the chant (I have done this elsewhere Severi 2002). We can say that the equivalence established between the pearl and the baby supposes a series of (implicit or explicit) statements such as these:
The The The The The The The mother is a tree. baby is a fruit. body of the mother is bleeding. tree is bleeding. fruit of the tree is bleeding. fruit is a ritual bead. bead is bleeding.
By the progressive extension of this means of transferring analogical connotations to other objects and other beings, an entire transformation of the world, formulated in ritual terms, is symbolically achieved in this Kuna shamanistic tradition. Here, as elsewhere, the linguistic instrument of these metamorphoses is parallelism. This technique of threading verbal images together (Townsley 1993: 457) is an all-pervasive feature of Amerindian shamanism, and Kuna shamans are particularly adept in its deployment. It must be stressed, however, that parallelism is not only a linguistic technique. When ritually applied to the description of the experience of an ill person, it becomes a way to construct a supernatural dimension which is thought of as a possible world, possessing an existence parallel to that of the ordinary world. In this context, for the shamanistic chant to refer to a bleeding fruit is to
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refer to the real experience of the woman giving birth to a child, and, simultaneously, to a mythical Tree-Mother bearing fruits. In my earlier work (Severi 2002), I sought to show that the same instrument, parallelism, can also be used in a reexive way to dene not only the world described by the ritual language, but also the identity of the person enunciating it. It is in this way that Amerindian shamans establish the special context which characterizes ritual communication. Let us return to our example of shamanistic chant, the Kuna Mu Igala. Like many other chants of the Kuna healing tradition, this begins with a sort of introductory section which contains an extensive and painstaking evocation of the ritual gestures and procedures necessary for enunciating the chant. In this introduction we see how the shaman moves around the hut, asks his wife to prepare a meal of boiled plantains, goes and washes in the river, returns to the hut, sits next to the ceremonial brazier, starts in total silence to burn cocoa beans in the brazier, gathers the statuettes that will assist him in the rite, sits down again, and begins to sing. In the Mu Igala, this preliminary part takes up a considerable share of the transcription of the chant (Holmr & Wassn 1953) and periodically alternates with an account, of a type that will be comparatively familiar to anyone studying shamanism, of the ups and downs of the soul snatched away by the spirits, whose absence has triggered the illness. In order to understand the paradox implied by a description of this type, we must remember that what the shaman is describing in this passage (the dialogue with the midwife, the encounter with his wife, the recognition of the illness, the meeting with the sick woman, the preparation fundamental for the rite of the brazier) is always something that has already occurred by the time he starts chanting. In other words, if we go from a simple reading of the text to a description of the conditions of the rite, what we see is that on each occasion the chanter refers to himself in the third person. The result is a kind of regressus ad innitum: a shaman, sitting next to his brazier, at the foot of the hammock where the woman about to go into childbirth is lying, is talking about a shaman who is sitting next to his brazier, at the foot of the hammock where the woman about to go into childbirth is lying, talking about a shaman and so on. Before starting to sing the chant, the chanter describes himself. For a long time I saw this as a relatively simple mnemonic device: as an example of a special genre of the Kuna ritual ways of speaking (Sherzer 1983), the Mu Igala possesses its own conditions of enunciation. It seems natural that tradition would need to preserve not only the text, but also its instructions for use. And the more natural way to do so is, understandably enough, to verbalize them, and just store them in the chant, before it starts (Severi 1993b). However, I have now come to see that this interpretation only accounts for a supercial aspect of the shamanistic ritual enunciation.We have already seen that the move consisting in describing someone speaking about someone preparing to speak has a rst consequence: it short-cuts time. If we keep in mind that, with a few trivial exceptions, only the present tense is used in this part of the chant, this becomes very clear. We have seen that the enunciator says he is approaching the ritual seat, the hammock, the door, and so on, when he has already performed such things, and is seated, as is required, toward the East, and facing the sea. The immediate consequence is that what is formulated in the present tense refers here to the past.This has many effects,
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but one of them is particularly relevant to the denition of the enunciator. When this present-meaning-past tense meets with the real present in other terms, when the linguistic description of the situation becomes an accurate one (the shaman is now seated there and is saying this) we have a situation where someone is speaking about someone speaking (now). We should remember an essential point: in the Kuna perspective it is precisely this description of the position of the speaker that characterizes the special kind of communication which is appropriate for ritual chanting. It is only when this part has been enunciated that the journey of the spirits into the supernatural world can begin, and the chant becomes ritually effective. The simple narration of a travel in the supernatural world would not be expected to have any therapeutic effect. Why is this so? What has changed here? Actually, this denition of a speaker speaking of himself speaking appears to be paradoxical only to the extent that we do not understand that it illustrates another way of applying parallelism. The shaman is actually using the same technique that we have seen used in the text concerning the baby progressively constructed as a bleeding fruit.That technique of transformation of a real body, or person, into a supernatural presence described by the chant is here applied to the enunciator himself. This transformation is never explicitly described in the chant, as in the case of the mother becoming a tree, or of the baby being transformed into a fruit. However, from the moment the singer starts to mention a chanter who is about to begin to recite his chant, from the point of view of the denition of the enunciator (well before the beginning of the narration of the shamanistic journey), an entirely new situation is established: the enunciators have become two, one being the parallel image of the other.There is the one who is said to be there (in the landscape described by the chant, preparing his travel to the underworld), and there is the one saying that he is here (in the hut, under the hammock where the ill person lies), chanting. This rst, elementary pattern of the process of making the enunciator plural, attributing to the enunciator a plural nature, is not an episodic detail. On the contrary, this doubling of the presence of the chanter is only a very simple example of the way in which a plural enunciator may be brought into being in shamanistic speech. This process of constructing a complex identity is a general phenomenon in Amerindian shamanism. As I have shown elsewhere (Houseman & Severi 1998), shamanistic ritual enunciation always involves the metamorphosis (or denition in ritual terms) of its enunciator. By chanting, a shaman becomes a novel sort of enunciator, constituted by a long series of connotations, including both the evil and the therapeutic spirits. The reexive use of parallelism which characterizes the Mu Igala is only the rst step in the same process by which it is possible to build up a set of images which ascribe plural and indeed contradictory identities to the enunciator. The shaman thus becomes a complex enunciator, a gure capable of lending his voice to different invisible beings. What in the relatively simple case of the Mu Igala is a simple way to double the presence of the chanter can become by a process that we could call cumulative inclusion a way of imbuing the chanter with a whole series of divergent identities. Language is used in this context not only as a means of conveying meaning, and a magical way of performing a therapeutic act, but also as an acoustic mask: a reexive means
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to dene the ritual identity of the speaker. Finally, let me underline that this denition is a parallelistic one: the enunciator becomes dened in the same terms as the supernatural beings are dened in the chants, that is, as being composed of canonical pairs (Fox 1988) of opposed connotations. This kind of formal analysis of the construction of the ritual enunciator, discussed thus far in relation to the Kuna example, may also prove useful in explaining important aspects of the Apache shamanistic tradition. For the Apache medicine man too, to sing a chant is a crucial way to display the power of an animal spirit through a special use of language. As Keith Basso has observed, the
power of a spirit, in a sense, is its song. Chants are said to belong to a power; they are also described as being part of it. In fact, the relationship between the two is so close that the term diyi may be used either in reference to a power itself, or to its associated chants This is especially true of medicine men, whose effectiveness in ceremonials rests squarely on their ability to sing (1970: 42).
Let us consider the example of the gan spirits, as impersonated by the Apache masked dancers. The very rich documentation gathered by Ferg and Kessel about the collection of masks now in the Arizona State Museum (Ferg 1987: 117-25) shows that the spirit impersonated by a gan dancer (often called simply a Spirit of the Mountain) is a complex representation, which involves references to a sequence of supernatural beings. This sequence leads from the snake to the lightning, passing through a number of related creatures belonging both to the Earth and to the Sky. Among them, the cross as a representation of the four cardinal points of the surface of the earth and the bird radiating rays related to the sun or to the lightning itself play a central role (see Fig.). Actually, the four cardinal points permeate all the shamanistic traditions of the Apache. The gan dance always takes place in an oriented space, where the cross of the four cardinal points is clearly marked by special hoops painted with the corresponding colours (Opler 1941: 107). The dancers have to kneel in the four directions, and to gyrate clockwise (Opler 1941: 108).The pollen, which accompanies their action, is also to be spread in the four directions. Opler meticulously describes this preparation of the ritual space in his monumental study (1941: 76-134), a process that John Bourke had observed as early as 1887:
I have seen this dance a number of times, but will conne my description to one seen at Fort Marion, Florida, 1887, when the Chiricahua Apache were conned as prisoners The masked medicine men advanced to where a squaw was holding up to them a little baby sick in its cradle The baby was held so as to occupy each of the cardinal points and face each point directly opposite; rst on the east side, facing the west; then the north side, facing the south; then the west side, facing the east, then the south side, facing the north (Bourke 1993 [1892]: 133-4).
Let us now pass to the impersonators of the gan spirits. Among the Apache, it is a duty of the masked dancer to respect his ritual role. He must totally identify with the gan he represents. No one may address or call the name of the impersonator whom he recognizes (Opler 1941: 112). Women were not
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Figure 1. A Western Apache gan dance (Ferg 1987).
supposed to know that the impersonators of gans in the gan dances were mere men (Goodwin 1969 [1938]: 535). The dancer must be a good receptacle for an image, which is utterly independent of his personal identity. If we take now the splendid description that Opler has given of a gan dance performed in the context of the female initiation ritual, we see that the entire ritual action is here founded on a connection between the movement of the dancers and the chant sung by the shaman who accompanies their movements. The shamans song dictates the rhythm itself of the dance:
The songs [sung during the therapeutic ritual] are classied in three groups, each related to one of three types of dance: the free step, the short step and the high step. The dancers, and especially their leader, must be able to recognize a song at once, and enter upon the proper step (Opler 1941: 114).
But the relationship between singer and dancer goes beyond this. In this context, the dancer is the image of the spirit, and the singing shaman is the voice of the dancer. Through the ritual action, identication is realized between the dancer and the spirit, and then between the singer and the dancer. When the shaman chants, for instance (Opler 1941: 108):
In the middle of the Holy Mountain, In the middle of its body, stands a hut, Brush-built for the Black Mountain Spirit. White lightning ashes in these moccasins, White lightning streaks in angular path, I am the lightning ashing and streaking.
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a complex identity is established both through the voice of the singer and the image of the dancer. A statement like I am the lightning ashing and streaking supposes, in this context, a chain of identications of the type presented in the following sequence:
I I I I I am am am am am the the the the the lightning. gan. snake. man possessing the snake power. shaman.
Here too, the denition of the shaman is generated by what we have called a reexive application of parallelism. An analysis of the process of ritual enunciation shows that the Apache and the Kuna shamanistic recitations are comparable. Among the Kuna, the complex identity of the enunciator is generated by a cumulative inclusion that is expressed only through words. In the Apache case, the complex identity of the ritual enunciator is constructed through the reference to the complex image of the gan dancer, which simultaneously refers to a sequence of related supernatural beings.
The Silas cult: the Four Crosses and the Holy Ground
Let us now come back to Silas John, and look closer at the new cult that he established: that of the Holy Ground prayer. We know that the doctrine preached by Silas John was very similar to Christianity. The memoirs published by a number of his followers provide valuable insights into the nature of this new prayer. First of all, a particular space, called the Four Crosses Holy Ground, was to be marked. Within it, the four cardinal points were to be precisely xed: The church consisted of a rectangle about six feet by four feet. Its sides faced the four sacred directions: the long sides were north and south, the short sides, east and west. A ve-foot Cross stood at each corner (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 150 [my emphasis]). There is an obvious analogy here between these crosses covered with black, white, yellow and blue symbols (1992: 150), and the special hoops painted with the corresponding colours mentioned by Opler (1941: 107) in his description of the gan dances. But there is more: according to the followers of Silas Johns cult, the cross itself acted like gans: they talked to them in dreams (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 150). Once the orientated space was established, the prayer was to be enunciated during the performance of a dance. Silas John himself was always the rst to perform the ritual.The believer was to follow exactly what John did, slowly crossing the Holy Ground.Very precise instructions were given regarding the gestures to be performed while saying the prayer, the steps to be stamped on the oor while chanting, the part of the space to be reached, and nally the sequence of the cardinal points to be touched (or honoured) during the recitation. Four Crosses marked these points, following the instructions of Silas. The description of the slow dance performed during the recitation of the prayer and the blessing made with pollen on the Four Crosses Holy Ground at the Mescalero reservation relates a sequence of prescribed gestures,
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where the traditional gestures of the Apache tradition are systematically connected with Christian liturgy: When the leader of the service approached the Holy Ground, he removed his hat, placing it to the east side of the plot. Then he walked to the west side of the rectangle and knelt, facing east (MacDonald Boyer & Duffy Gayton 1992: 150 [my emphasis]), just like the gan dancer described by Opler (1941). After this, Silas performed a sort of synthesis between the sign of the cross and the traditional manipulation of the pollen. According to MacDonald Boyer and Duffy Gayton, he
took a pinch of pollen in his right hand, holding it to the east while his left hand, palm in, lay across his breast. He touched his right shoulder, the top of his head and his breast with the yellow powder, nishing by making two clockwise circles over his head (1992: 151).
Then he blessed each Cross with pollen (1992: 151). This sequence of gestures was so important in the ritual that every attendant to the service had to repeat, in the same order and with the same gestures, the example of the Prophet. Like the leader, he or she had to start from the east, turn in the same manner, take a pinch of pollen, kneel to the Cross, turn clockwise etc. (1992: 151). Many commentators (e.g. Goodwin & Kaut 1954; Kessel 1976) have attributed the scandal raised by the dances that Silas performed to the use that he made of live snakes. That was also, for them, the main means used by Silas to capture the imagination of his followers, and thereby gain authority over them. However, it is easy to show that this was by no means a novelty in Apache tradition: all his predecessors were medicine men specially trained in the powers and songs related to the snakes. The father of Silas had himself been a specialist, and he had taught his son how to capture and use the rattlesnakes. Regan (1930) among many others has mentioned the traditional use of snakes in Apache shamanistic practices. Appearances not withstanding, the real explanation for the success attributed to Silas and his rituals is to be found elsewhere. A comparison of the ritual recitation and dance taught by the Prophet with traditional Apache rituals shows that while reciting the glory of the new Christ, the faithful follower of Silas Johns cult was actually simultaneously performing something very similar to a gan dance precisely the dance that Silas had prohibited. When the believer, imitating the behaviour of the Prophet, utters his prayer, he is behaving like a good Christian. But when he uses the Apache sacred pollen, kneels to a painted cross representing the East, or turns clockwise to step outside the church, he performs the same gestures made by a gan impersonator before his dance. We have seen that the traditional dance involved a progressive identication of the shaman singer with his animal spirit: the gan. Then the singer, as gan, was identied with the dancer. During the recitation of the Four Crosses prayer, a similar process occurs: the participant who prays like a Christian becomes identied, by his dancing, with Silas John, the Prophet, and then with the Apache Spirit of the Mountain, the gan.What the performer is doing while performing the dance contradicts what he or she says while reciting the prayer. In the space of the Holy Ground, the person praying becomes simultaneously a person who dances to the gans.
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The analysis of the ritual action, based on the identication of the pragmatic context of the enunciation of Silas Johns prayer, shows that the transformation that gives birth to the messianistic religion here lies in an imagistic (iconical) use of a doctrinal (discursive) mode. The ritual actions taught by Silas contradict his teachings. The new religion is, in fact the old one: the prayer is also the dance he has prohibited. However, if we use Whitehouses distinction between the two modes, the imagistic mode for the action and the images, and the doctrinal mode for the prayers, we see that the Holy Ground prayer is neither absurd nor contradictory. Rather, if we use the distinction in an intensional way, to understand its contradictory aspects, it appears as a way to generate complexity through paradox. In fact, the most important consequence of the simultaneous use of these two different modes of communication (imagistic for the sequence of actions, doctrinal for the text) is the construction of a particular kind of ritual identity. Silas John speaks as a Christian and acts as a traditional shaman: once placed in the ritual context, he is both the one and the other. We can conclude, then, that the analysis of the counterintuitive conditions of communication taught by Silas John to his followers to establish his new prayer shows that the solution of the problem posed by the apparently absurd statement I am Jesus because I am a shaman is to be looked for not in the contradiction between the two opposed predicates, but in the complexity, ritually realized, of the enunciating subject. This conclusion has a general consequence regarding religious syncretism and cultural contact. Contrary to appearances, the ritual denition of Silas John as Jesus, the Apache Shaman founder of the Four Crosses Holy Ground is not the result of a cultural exchange of beliefs; it is just a further application of the parallelistic logic that we have seen in the example of the Kuna chanter. Indeed, the fact of acquiring a complex identity, constructed by the accumulation of contradictory connotations, is a typical feature of Amerindian shamanism not of Christianity. The consequence is that, in his claim that To become Jesus, not Yesun was a way to oppose, and not to assimilate, Christianity, Silas John was right. The I who says to his people call me Jesus is not a product of the mixture of two religious traditions. This I should instead be seen as a paradoxical, but still parallelistic, enunciator, made, like the Kuna chanter, of canonical pairs of connotations. The analysis of the pragmatic conditions of the ritual propagation of Silas Johns messianistic message, effectively supported in this case by the distinction between doctrinal and imagistic modes of religiosity, shows that there is no syncretism operating here. Since Christ had become a term of the series of parallelistic pairs that characterize shamans, to call Silas John, among other things, Jesus was not a way to repudiate the shamanistic tradition, but a new way to be faithful to it. Let us now try to explain, on this new basis, the intense propagation that characterizes the messianistic message. Following the Sperber-Boyer approach, both traditional shamanism and missionary Christianity had equal chances to prevail in this context: they both contained a signicant number of counterintuitive representations. What we see in the history of the Silas John cult, however, is that the pre-existing religion was seriously weakened by the spread of the new one. It is the messianistic religion which has prevailed. However, this success is not due to the invention of new religious representations. From
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the point of view of the semantic content, the religious message of Silas John and his followers conveys nothing that is really new. What is new, as we have seen, is the particular way in which the pragmatic context of the message is built. The new prayer taught by Silas John establishes a logical link between two contradictory denitions of the Prophet. Silas is a powerful Apache shaman because he shows himself to be an incarnation of Christ, and vice versa. In this sense, the ritual action introduces paradox in the way the new religious message is conveyed.The simultaneous use of the two modes of religiosity, imagistic (dance) and discursive (prayer, or chant), constitutes an effective means to construct a counterintuitive pragmatic context within which religious representations can be propagated. Messianistic religion prevails because of the paradoxical relationship that it establishes between the two existing religions. It is not an entirely new counterintuitive representation that accounts for the propagation of the new religion, but the unexpected relationship generated by Silas Johns message between contradictory religious messages. The Christian cross exhibiting the Apache snake illustrates this process in a single, intense image. The conict between two different cultures is here successfully interpreted by paradox, since, in the messianistic perspective, both represent God. We can conclude that paradoxical contexts of communication, as well as counterintuitive representations, make for successful cultural propagation.
NOTES A previous version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Modes of Religiosity organized by James Laidlaw and Harvey Whitehouse at Kings College, Cambridge, in December 2001. I wish to thank all the participants for their comments as well as two anonymous JRAI readers; their suggestions were very helpful in clarifying the argument. 1 According to Harvey Whitehouse, religious traditions can establish themselves following two modes, the doctrinal and the imagistic. Religions based on the doctrinal mode possess a discursive form and a stable body of knowledge. For its transmission, this mode needs frequent repetition of rituals and relies, from a cognitive point of view, on semantic memory. A typical example of a doctrinal mode of religiosity is to be found in modern Protestantism. The imagistic mode does not refer to an established body of knowledge. It is, rather, focused on intense personal experiences, like ecstatic visions, or initiation rituals. These experiences are transmitted as ashbulb memories and subsequently generate spontaneous exegesis. Whitehouse (1992; 2000) has argued that these two modes have a deep inuence on the social structure and internal dynamics of religious movements. The doctrinal mode generally implies a stable hierarchy, the imagistic mode usually generates unstable, tendentially egalitarian social groups.
REFERENCES Basso, K. 1970. The Cibecue Apache. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston. & N. Anderson 1975. A Western Apache writing system: the symbols of Silas John. In Linguistics and anthropology in honor of C.F .Voegelin (eds) M.D. Kinkade, K.L. Hale & O.Werner, 27-52. Lisse: Peter de Ridder. Bourke, E. 1993 [1892]. The medicine men of the Apache. Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887-1888: 443-603. Boyer, P. 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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& C. Severi 1997-9. Cognition, culture et communication: acquisition et effets culturels des categories ontologiques intuitives. Research project report. Ministre de la Recherche, Paris. Fausto, C. 2002. The Bones Affair: knowledge practices in contact situations seen from an Amazonian case. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 8, 669-90. Ferg, A. (ed.) 1987. Western Apache material culture: the Goodwin and Guenther collections. Tucson: Arizona University Press. Fox, R. 1988. To speak in pairs: essays in the ritual languages of Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge: University Press. Freud, S. 1991 [1899]. The interpretation of dreams. London: Penguin. Goodwin, G. 1969 [1938]. The social organization of the Western Apache. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. & C. Kaut 1954. A Native religious movement among the White Mountain and Cibecue Apache. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 10, 385-404. Haley, J.L. 1981. Apache: a history and culture portrait. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Henry, J. n.d. The cult of Silas John. Unpublished manuscript. Partially printed in R. MacDonald Boyer & N. Duffy Gayton, Apache mothers and daughters: four generations of a family. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Holmer, N. & H. Wassn 1953. Mu-Igala or the way of Mu. Gothenburg: Etnograska Museet. Houseman, M. & C. Severi 1998. Naven or the other self: an essay on ritual action. Leyden: Brill. Kaplan, M. 1995. Neither cargo nor cult: ritual politics and the colonial imagination in Fiji. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Kessel, W.B. 1976. White Mountain Apache religious cult movements: a study in ethnohistory. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona. La Barre, W. 1972. Materials for a history of studies of crisis cults. Current Anthropology 12, 3-44. Linton, R. 1943. Nativistic movements. American Anthropologist 43, 230-40. MacDonald Boyer, R. & N. Duffy Gayton 1992. Apache mothers and daughters: four generations of a family. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Mtraux, A. 1972. Voodoo in Hati. New York: Schocken Books. Mooney, J. 1896. The Ghost Dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 14. Washington, D.C. Opler, M. 1941. An Apache life-way: the economic, social and religious institutions of the Chiricahua Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Overholt, T.W. 1974. The Ghost Dance of 1890 and the nature of prophetic process. Ethnohistory 21, 37-63. Regan, A. 1930. Notes on the Indians of the Fort Apache region. (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 31). Washington, D.C.: American Museum of Natural History. Sainsbury, R.M. 1988. Paradoxes. Cambridge: University Press. Severi, C. 1993a.Talking about souls: on the pragmatic construction of meaning in Kuna chants. In Cognitive aspects of religious symbolism (ed.) P. Boyer, 165-81. Cambridge: University Press. 1993b. La memoria rituale: follia e immagine del Bianco in una tradizione amerindiana. Florence: La Nuova Italia. (Spanish edition, 1994: La memoria ritual. Quito: Abya Yala.) 2002. Memory, reexivity and belief. Social Anthropology 10:1, 23-40. Sherzer, J. 1983. Kuna ways of speaking. Austin: Texas University Press. Sperber, D. 1985. Anthropology and psychology: toward an epidemiology of representations. Man (N.S.) 20, 73-89. 1996. Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Stephen, M. 1982. Dreaming is another power!: the social signicance of dreams among the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea. Oceania 53, 106-22. Stoller, P. 1989. Fusion of the worlds: an ethnography of possession among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University Press. Tarski, A. 1956 [1933]. The concept of truth in formalized languages. In Logic, semantics, metamathematics, A. Tarski, 152-278. New York: Clarendon. Thrapp, D. 1988. The conquest of Apacheria. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Townsley, G. 1993. Song paths: the ways and means of Yaminahaua shamanic knowledge. LHomme 126-8, 449-68.
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Veber, H. 2003. Ashaninka messianism: the production of a black hole in Western Amazonian ethnography. Current Anthropology 44, 183-211. Whitehouse, H. 1992. Memorable religions: transmission, codication and change in divergent Melanesian context. Man (N.S.) 27, 777-97. 2000. Arguments and icons: divergent modes of religiosity. Oxford: University Press. Worsley, P. 1968. The trumpet shall sound: a study of cargo cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken Books.
Capturer limagination : une approche cognitive de la complexit culturelle

Rsum quelques exceptions prs, llaboration dune thorie de la cognition humaine ayant une porte anthropologique gnrale a t associe une invitable rduction de la complexit ethnographique. Aucune analyse de cas na encore montr la possibilit dune approche cognitive de la complexit culturelle. Lauteur souhaite montrer ici quune approche cognitive diffrente peut amliorer notre comprhension des faits ethnographiques et nous aider considrablement revoir plusieurs concepts anthropologiques traditionnels. Pour appuyer cette thse, il prsente une analyse du mouvement religieux messianiste des Apaches de lOuest San Carlos et White Mountain, en Arizona. Laboratoire danthropologie sociale, Collge de France, 52 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine 75005, Paris, France. severi@ehess.fr

AA - VV., Complessità e CAS (Lansing, Wiesner, Severi)

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Lansing Stephen, CAS-Complex Adaptive Systems

Wiessner Polly, The Vines of complexity

Severi Carlo, Capturing Imagination (Cultural complexity)

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

INTRODUCTION: THE DIVINE TAPE PLAYER

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

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COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

Complex Systems and the Edge of Chaos

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

THE CRITIQUE OF EQUILIBRIUM THEORY IN ECOLOGY AND ECONOMICS

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

COOPERATION AND THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

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COMPLEX SYSTEMS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

CRITIQUES, REVIEWS, AND RESOURCES

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org

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The Vines of Complexity

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Agents and Egalitarian Institutions

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The Enga and Their Historical Traditions Institutional Change

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table 1 Chronological Scheme of Events Discussed in Text

2 (ca. 194575) 1 (ca. 19752005)

Equality at the Starting Point

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The Merging of the Great Wars and the Tee Cycle

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Tee Pingi: main gifts sent from east to west

Main Tee gifts channeled into Great War exchanges

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Agents and Egalitarian Institutions

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Ideology, Institutions, and Change

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Old and New Institutions Juxtaposed

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