I was terming it that way in response to the guy whose post preceded mine. I guess to get across the point I am trying to, I need to take it straight from the book:
THE MYTH OF EQUILIBRIUM
The assumption that primitive cultures are static is grounded in Misconception No. 2: The Idea of Intirinsic Equilibrim. The idea that cultures stay the same unless jostled by such outside forces as receding glaciers or sudden drought. Happily such notions have lost favor among many archeologists and anthropologists. But it has more than it’s share of proponents - that is, more than zero - and has deeply influenced thinking not just about agriculture but about culture generally. A recent archeology textbook asserts that cultures do not change in any patterned fasion as long as they are successfully adapted to their environments and the environments don’t change. It is this assumption of equilibrium that compels archeologists to seek an external "cause for any development as dramatic as agriculture.
Subscribers to the equilibrium fallacy underestimate the unsettling nature of human innovation - the extent to which new ideas and techniques spring from within societies and transform them. But downplaying our species genius is not the only problem. As we’ve seen, the main impediment to farming isn’t thought to be a lack of inventiveness, but a lack of neccesity. As Marvin Harris has put it, " What keeps hunter gatherers from switching over to agriculture is not ideas but cost/benefits. The idea of agriculturen is useless when you can get all the meat and vegetables you want from a few hours hunting and gathering."
Here aiding and abetting the “equilibrium fallacy,” is misconception nmber three: That human societies ar efundumentally unified devoted to meeting their collective needs. The mistake goes back to the romantic notion of hunter gatherer societies as oases of communal bliss. All for one and one for all. And if all are getting enough food, then why should any one bother trying something new?
The answer is that hunter gatherers are in truth just like us. They’re competitive, they’re status hungry, above all, they are individuals. In those hunter gatherer societies that are proto agricultural, the clsuters of cultivated wild food aren’t typically wild property, they are owned by a particular family or extended family that dispenses the harvest as it sees fit. Once you start thinking of hunter gatherers as driven by the same physical and psychic needs of themselves and their families, there is no shortage of reasons why they might cultivate plants in their spare time.
Consider (oncer again) the Northwest Indians whose lavish useo of cultivated wild plants is now coming to light through the work of the geograpeher Douglas Duer. A Kwakiutl household might have it’s own saltmarsh garden for cover roots or silverweed roots (nutritional delicacies) and might tend plots of wid berries or edible ferns. In hard times- when sya the salmon weren’t running, the family family might eat the entire harvest. But often the food would serve the family’s interests mroe obliquely. Being a gastronomical delight, it could be swapped for candlefish oil, and sometimes crates of garden grown food were paired wiht other foods and handicrafts to fetch a prised copper shield,. Often such exchnages took place between villages, orchestrated by big men, but nonzero sumness also swelled up within villages. A household might “give” a food to a needy neighbor, with a view rom future reciprocation. In the meanwhile, the giver, in addition to having garnered an IOU, enoyed soem status elevation. And families constantly in a position to give enjoyed chronically high status, like philanthropists.
Even in modern suburbs and small towns, avid gardners win local esteem by givin neighbors fresh tomatoe sor flowers. This strikes most of us as normal behavior. But the possibility that people might behave the same way in a primitive society seems rarely is never to cross the minds of archeologists as they ponder the mystery of agriculture. The various benefits of gardening were an incentive to refine it. There’s evidence that the Northwest Coast Indians were weedign out the less robust specimins, the firs tstep to domestication. And to expand on that level land in their uneven habitat, they build walls, which had the added virtue of holding nutrient rich soils. The Kwaktiutl word for garden means palce of manufactured soils. In addition to the Northwest Coast Indias and other proto agricultural societies, there are “cultural fossils” further along the evolution towards agriculture. Various “horticultural societies” grow domesticated crops in gardens but still rely on hunting and gathering. Most fo these societies resembled Northwest Coast indians, wiht Gardening a private enterprise that pays off at the family level. Thus, a Yanomamo man in the jungles of South America, having just gotten married, will clear a
garden for plantains, maize, cotton, tobacco, and other crops. He is not doing this for the good of his whole village. Indeed, he may surround the coveted tobacco with a fence, even planting sharp bones as booby traps.When he shares his harvest, he will do so selectively, cementing freindships and unwritten IOU. Repaying his own debts and ammassing status.
THE FARMER TAKES A WIFE (OR TWO)
Could something as ephemeral as status really entice people into becoming agricultural innovators even when they face no regular shortage of food. The answer comes from looking at the top of the pecking order- at the Big Man or “Head Man”, a version of what is found among the Yanomomo and horticultural societies generally Big Men tend to have not ust big gardens but big numbers of choice wives.
The idea here isn’t that aspiring Big Men sketched out a systematic plan for aquiring multiple wives. During the evolution of our the evolution of our species, one of the benefits of male status was easier access to sex. (So too with our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. Because of this correlation between status and fecundity, genes imbuing males with a thirst for status have fared well by natural selection. The resulting drive to impress people needn’t bring conscious awareness of it’s reason for being anymore than it entails a knowledge of nutrition. Status just feels gratifying, it can be it’s own reward. , even if it’s ultimate evolutionary purpose was genetic proliferation.
On the other hand, conscious awareness of the sexual payoffs for farming is, if not necessary, hardly out of the question. When Soni of the Solomon Islands was preparing those thirty two succlent pigs he knew he wasn’t going to eat, he no doubt knew that the more adroit Solomo Islad Feast givers, that is Big Men, got as many as four wives. Indeed, sometimes the link between the amassing food and amassing wives is explicit. Among the Northwest Coast Indians and some other polygamous people, loads of garden grown food could be part of the brideprice paid for a wife.
Archeologists, faced with the observed correlation between a farmer’s status and wealth on the one hand, and his number of wives and offspring in another have tended to get things backwards. Big Men are said to seek multiple wives “since many wives produce more food than one wife” and more children because 'many children produce more food than few children." To be sure, Big Men may value the labor provided by a large family. But in terms of the ultimate logic of their quest - the Darwinian logic that selected the genes that fuel their quest - they are amassing food to amass wives, not the other way around. If it pays off nutritionally, that’s great, but even if it doesn’t, it is valuable, because it raises their status in relation to competing males. Among the Trobiand Islanders, one anthropologist reports, farmers aimed to accumulate so many yams that they may rot in storehouses and stimulate the envy of their rivals.
The problem with scholars mystified by agriculture’s orgins is that they tend to view the heirchy as a product of domestication., in which case, it couldn’t be a cause. Hence, misconception number four: The notion of the egalitarian hunter band
From here, I’ll have to sum it up, since I’m getting tired of copying all this down:
Two examples are given on hunter gatherer bands being prone to social climbing, the second one the most important: The Gana,within whom 1/4 of the men have more than one wife. It is then noted that the reason that the reason Gana’s social inequality cannot have eemerged with agriculture is that 5 percent of the !Kung men had more than one wife. The subtlety of this stratification is because of the fact that if there were a shortfall, the results cold be felt by any one family. Therefore, it is in everybody’s best interest to share their resources. With the Gana, those restraints are lifted.
It then gives a theory for a transition from hunter gatherer to agricultural:
Hayden’s "competitive feasting theory: If in any society some aspiring big Man can get fellow villagers to produce lots of food, he can use it to gain status in his feasts with other villagers. In the process he gains political within his own village.
The mistake Hayden makes, says the author, is claiming that this kind of thing exists in some people and not in others. I’m sure we can agree that’s false. Some people climb higher than others, but the urge to climb is still there. The more widespreadnthe urge to impress, the stronger the drive of cultural evolution. If everyone is striving, than every increment in th development of agriculture is easier to explain. What do you think?
