Feasting, Craft Specialization, and the Ritual Mode of Production in Small-Scale Societies

Economic intensification has been documented in a diversity of small-scale societies. The existing archaeological theory concerning such intensification has tended to privilege economic and political explanations and largely ignores social action and ritual performance as motivations for economic change. In this article, 1 use both ethnographic and archaeological data to argue that ceremonial feasting and the need for socially valued goods, which are critical for ritual performance and necessary for a variety of social transactions, create the demand that underwrites and sustains economic intensification in small-scale societies. Food for large-scale feasts is acquired through the intensification of food production and procurement targeted specifically for feasting, rather than from the surplus available from routine subsistence production. Large-scale demands for socially valued goods tend to result in specialization on the production of "extraordinary" material culture, which is characterized by two modes of circulation, in networks of social obligations or as offerings in sacred locations. [Key words.craft specialization, exchange, feasting, ritual]     

The Origins of Prestige Goods as Honest Signals of Skill and Knowledge

This work addresses the emergence of prestige goods, which appear with fully modern Homo sapiens but at different times in different regions. I theorize that such goods came into existence to signal the level of skill held by their owners, in order to gain deference benefits from learning individuals in exchange for access. A game theoretic model demonstrates that a signaling strategy can invade a non-signaling population and can be evolutionarily stable under a set of reasonable parameter values. Increasing competition levels were likely the selective force driving the adoption of this novel strategy. Two changes in the social context in which prestige processes operate are tentatively identified as leading to increased levels of competition for prestige: (1) increasing group sizes and (2) increasing complexity or size of the existing cultural repertoire. Implications for prestige goods’ later use in social and political competition are discussed.     

Inalienable ethnography: keeping-while-giving and the Trobriand case

In Inalienable possessions , Annette Weiner (1992) focuses on the paradox of 'keeping-while-giving' rather than the 'norm of reciprocity' as the central issue of social life, drawing heavily on Trobriand examples. In this article, key elements of Weiner's theory are contrasted with prevailing views of Melanesian personhood and agency and with canonical Western notions of exchange, and her use of the Trobriand materials is juxtaposed with previously published ethnographic accounts of the same practices. It is argued that Weiner's ethnographic illustrations do not lend support to her theory of inalienable possessions; that her conceptual framework is at considerable variance with well-founded understandings of Melanesian sociality; and that the paradox of keeping-while-giving is more appropriately seen as deriving from Western presuppositions of individual boundedness, subjectivity, possession, ownership, and hierarchy, and the need to establish permanence in an entropic world.     

Selling with the san: Representations of bushman people and artefacts in South African print advertisements

This paper examines the use of visual images of the Bushman peoples (San) and their cultural objects in contemporary South African advertising. As an image is a site of meaning, the relationship between the people represented in the advertisement and the culture for which the advertisement is produced demonstrates strategies of subjection and power. Within the context of the advertisement, I explore the extent to which San people are appropriated by the consumer society and their ritual objects reduced or altered to a Western aesthetic dimension. The contexts and ideas of the producing society determine production of the visual object.

The relationship between the San “artefact” and the advertisement as a work of “art” reflects a dimension of South African social and political processes. Representations of the two juxtaposed societies suggest that the value systems and cultural attitudes of the dominant group present contested domains which are explored. Bushmen represent a malleable signifier which is used to promote an apparently/ ostensibly applied vision of an emerging non‐racial country.     

Evolution in group-structured populations can resolve the tragedy of the commons

Public goods are the key features of all human societies and are also important in many animal societies. Collaborative hunting and collective defence are but two examples of public goods that have played a crucial role in the development of human societies and still play an important role in many animal societies. Public goods allow societies composed largely of cooperators to outperform societies composed mainly of non-cooperators. However, public goods also provide an incentive for individuals to be selfish by benefiting from the public good without contributing to it. This is the essential paradox of cooperation-known variously as the Tragedy of the Commons, Multi-person Prisoner's Dilemma or Social Dilemma. Here, we show that a new model for evolution in group-structured populations provides a simple and effective mechanism for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in such a social dilemma. This model does not depend on kin selection, direct or indirect reciprocity, punishment, optional participation or trait-group selection. Since this mechanism depends only on population dynamics and requires no cognitive abilities on the part of the agents concerned, it potentially applies to organisms at all levels of complexity.     

Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge, and Social Relations

Starting from Giddens's concept of mutual knowledge, in this article I argue for an expanded definition of storage as a situated practice through which groups construct identity, remember, and control knowledge as part of a moral economy. Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological examples from a range of societies, including those of the Trobriand Islands, Neolithic Europe, and Mesoamerica, I consider the spatial and social meaning of utilitarian, household storage. Many of the social meanings embodied in utilitarian storage are found to also inform other kinds of storage, especially those categorized as burials and votive offerings, or caches, [storage, mutual knowledge, social memory, inalienable wealth, Mesoamerica]     

Divergent modes of address and (re)contextualization in Loma ritual prayer

This article explains the ritual symbolism of a sacrificial rite characteristic of the so-called 'secret societies' of the conflict-ridden Upper Guinea forest and coastal region of West Africa. Whereas the political dimension of these secret societies or cults is relatively well known, very little knowledge exists about the ritual communication with imperceptible beings around which the cults are organized. It appears from the study of Loma ritual prayer that secret mask cults are typical self-referential entities constituted by a symbolism emerging from a reconfiguration in ritual speech of modes of relationships characteristic of the social structure of the Loma of Guinea and Liberia. Against recent anthropological theories of ritual which reject the idea that ritual can be defined as communication of meaning, it is argued that Loma sacrificial prayer conveys an essential 'message' about the secret cult's constitution. In addition to an analysis of the recontextualization of modes of relationships that typifies Loma ritual prayer, the article also pays attention to indexical expressions in prayer which serve to negotiate social relationships and power relations external to the ritual context.     

Art and Agency: A Reassessment

In his book, Art and agency , Alfred Gell presents a theory of art based neither on aesthetics nor on visual communication. Art is defined by the distinctive function it performs in advancing social relationships through 'the abduction of agency'. Art objects are indexes of the artist's or model's agency. This article examines Gell's use of agency, particularly in relation to the ritual art that is central to his argument. Focusing on Gell's employment of Peirce's term 'index' (out of his triad of index, icon, and symbol), I note that Peirce's approach deflects attention from signification towards the link between art works and the things to which they refer. I consider what Peirce meant by abduction, and conclude that while Gell makes a good case for the agency of art objects he does not explain the distinctive ways in which art objects extend their maker's or user's agency. Gell lacked the time to make detailed revisions before publication and I acknowledge that, given more time, he might have revised some parts of the book.     

A personal narrative of particular things: Tevau (feather money) from Santa Cruz,Solomon Islands

In October 2006, Salome Samou, from Santa Cruz Island, Solomon Islands, visited the British Museum, London, to see the collections from her home island. This paper presents her response to the tevau in the collection (frequently referred to as ‘feather money’). Tevau are objects of prestige and value, formerly used in a regional network of exchange. They were especially important in bridewealth payments, but have not been used on Santa Cruz Island since the 1980s. Today, Samou wants to revive their use, a re‐introduction that reflects a linkage of tevau and their manufacture to contemporary ideas of social identity. This paper explores Samou’s interaction with the tevau in the collection, including past interpretations of their use. For Samou, the process of viewing the tevau produced a narrative that embraced personal memories as well as challenged perspectives on past cultural and social practices. I discuss how these particular objects materialise transformed, and transforming, regimes of value.     

Crania with mutilated facial skeletons: A new ritual treatment in an early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B cranial cache at Tell Qarassa North (South Syria)

The removal of crania from burials, their ritual use and their disposal, generally in cranial caches, are the most particular characteristics of the funerary ritual in the transition to the Neolithic in the Near East. Despite the importance of this ritual, detailed studies of cranial caches are rare. This funerary ritual has traditionally been interpreted as a form of ancestor‐veneration. However, this study of the cranial caches found at the site of Tell Qarassa North, South Syria, dated in the second half of the ninth millennium BC, questions this interpretation. The 12 crania, found in two groups arranged in two circles on the floor of a room, belonged to male individuals, apart from one child and one preadolescent. In 10 of the 11 cases, the facial skeletons were deliberately mutilated. In the context of the Pre‐Pottery Neolithic B, when the symbolism of the human face played a vital role in ritual practice, this mutilation of the facial skeleton could be interpreted as an act of hostility. In the absence of indicators of social stratification or signs of violence that might indicate more coercive forms of society, the veneration of ancestors has been explained as a mechanism for social cohesion, which would have been necessary in a context of rapid growth in the population of settlements. However, data on the negative nature of some funerary rites, of punishment or indifference rather than veneration, should make us question an over‐idealized view of the first Neolithic societies. Am J Phys Anthropol 149:205–216, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Culture Matters in the Neolithic Transition and Emergence of Hierarchy in Thy, Denmark: Distinguished Lecture

How did the emergence of hierarchical social structure that followed the domestication of plants and animals in the Neolithic actually come about? I suggest that material media were instrumental in this transformation, as culture was changed by incorporating such newmedia as landscape constructions and elaborate prestige objects. During the Neolithic transition in Thy, Denmark, local corporate groups formed, and, subsequently, Bronze Age chieftains came to power. Shifts in material culture suggest possible connections to these institutional changes, namely the materialization of property rights by burial monuments and permanent domestic architecture and the centralization of power through the controlled production of wealth objects. I conclude that, as part of social process, the nature of culture has been transformed by incorporating material culture with specific characteristics of scale, permanency, and control that were vital to institutional change.     

Expansionary Dynamics of Some Early Pristine States

Immediately following on endogenous processes of state formation, many pristine civilizations expanded further by placing a variety of isolated core outposts at key junctions of their surrounding periphery. This cross-cultural phenomenon is documented here in reference to early Mesopotamian (Sumerian), Classic Mesoamerican (Teotihuacan), Mature Harappan, and Predynastic Egyptian civilizations. The commonality in the use of outposts in these otherwise very different civilizations is explained by three interconnected factors shared by many early states. First, the expanding economies of increasingly urbanized early state polities required regularized access to nonlocal resources. Second, for their own political ends elites in less-advanced surrounding communities would have been amenable to granting such access to early core societies. And, third, transportational constraints common to all premodern societies meant that the most efficient way to channel regular exchanges between distant geographic areas and differentially structured societies was by means of strategically positioned core outposts serving as collection points for peripheral resources and as distribution nodes for core-manufactured prestige goods.     

Prestige,possessions, and progeny

It has been suggested by some that the acquisition of symbolic capital in terms of honor, prestige, and power translates into an accumulation of material capital in terms of tangible belongings, and that on the basis of these goods high reproductive success may be achieved. However, data on completed fertility rates over more than one generation in so-called traditional societies have been rare. Ethnographic and demographic data presented here on the pastoral Bakkarwal of northern India largely corroborate the hypothesis concerning the interdependence between the attainment of various cultural goals and differential reproduction rates and indicate that the numbers of (especially male) surviving offspring and siblings are crucial to a man’s position in society.     

The spiritual commons: Some immaterial aspects of community economies in eastern Indonesia

Informed by anthropologist Stephen Gudeman’s dialect between the interacting realms of community and market economies, I seek in this article to focus on aspects of the commons and the shared values of a community that might be referred to as the ‘spiritual commons’. The phrase speaks specifically to the ideas and practices that guide the ritual and spiritual elements of social life. I argue that the spiritual commons is not a realm set apart from economic life but integral to its reproduction. Gift exchange, sacrifice and commensality enacted as expressions of religious sociality represent economies of symbolic goods that serve both material and ideational ends. The article draws upon ethnographies of eastern Indonesia and the comparative possibilities expressed in case studies from Islamic southeast Sulawesi and Catholic Flores.     

Bride‐service and the absent gift

Building on a previous experiment to apply Strathern's discussions of Melanesian gift exchange to ethnography relating to Tukanoan societies in Northwest Amazonia, this essay asks why other authors should repeatedly affirm that the gift has no relevance in the Amazonian context. Two answers are proposed. Firstly, the authors concerned tend to assume that a particular type of social formation is characteristic of Amazonia as a whole. The Tukanoans, who engage in ceremonial exchange of food and goods, do not fit this rubric. Secondly, despite their differences, these authors assume that Amazonian societies are bride‐service societies where, axiomatically, there can be no gift. The Tukanoans are not bride‐service societies and, if anything, tend towards the bride‐wealth alternative. This Tukanoan exception serves to re‐emphasize the diversity of Amazonian social formations, one that would have been even greater in the archaeological past. It also warns against the dangers of over‐hasty theoretical closure.     

The ‘Two Men’ of Anganen Exchange: Structure and Concepts of the Individual in Highland Papua New Guinea

This paper addresses some of the political implications of exchange structure in Highland Papua New Guinea. It focuses largely on the dual exchange modes (termed mundane and ceremonial) of the Anganen (SHP). By considering variation within a corpus of factors concerning social relations, gender, material provisioning, the meaning of exchange and valuables, and so on, each mode can be seen to give rise to a particular notion of transactor, one heavily constrained by these factors, the other able to operate with relative autonomy. Some aspects of exchange in geographically proximate societies (Kewa, Mendi, Enga, Melpa) are then also briefly discussed.     

Against the inalienable right to withdraw from research

In this paper I argue, against the current consensus, that the right to withdraw from research is sometimes alienable. In other words, research subjects are sometimes morally permitted to waive their right to withdraw. The argument proceeds in three major steps. In the first step, I argue that rights typically should be presumed alienable, both because that is not illegitimately coercive and because the general paternalistic motivation for keeping them inalienable is untenable. In the second step of the argument, I consider three special characteristics of the right to withdraw, first that its waiver might be exploitative, second that research involves intimate bodily access, and third that it is irreversible. I argue that none of these characteristics justify an inalienable right to withdraw. In the third step, I examine four considerations often taken to justify various other allegedly inalienable rights: concerns about treating yourself merely as a means as might be the case in suicide, concerns about revoking all your future freedoms in slavery contracts, the resolution of coordination problems, and public interest. I argue that the motivations involved in these four types of situations do not apply to the right to withdraw from research.     

Appetites and aspirations: Consuming wildlife in Laos

Research on wildlife use is strongly associated with conservation and environmental debates. Yet, popular beliefs about wildlife consumption also offer many opportunities for discussing identity and social change. To demonstrate this, I examine ideas about eating common types of wildlife in Laos in light of the dialectical contrast between civilised settlements (muang) and the wild forest (pa). The exclusion of wildlife from the widely practised baci ritual and the popularity of wildlife consumption indicate the potency of these animals as social objects. In a contemporary context of widespread social and environmental change across Laos, the practice of eating wildlife is being constructed as an assertion of Lao identity that blends an idealised tradition with a status‐conscious modernity. Ambivalent desires for social transformation draw upon ambiguous symbols to find expression in beliefs as well as in popular social practice.     

Politics And Gastropolitics: Gender And The Power Of Food In Two African Pastoralist Societies

Male-centred aspects of political behaviour have generally remained the explanatory and interpretive focuses in analyses of the social organization of African pastoralists. While recent work on African pastoralists has shed increasing light on the lives of women, I argue that key assumptions underlying anthropological models of male dominance in these societies have been insufficiently challenged. Drawing on recent approaches in gender and social organization that highlight the mutual constitution of domestic and political domains, I examine comparative material from two well-known pastoralist societies: the Samburu of northern Kenya and the Nuer of southern Sudan. In doing so, I suggest strong linkages between male-dominated 'political spheres' and areas of domestic life in which the role of women is more significant – particularly processes of domestic food distribution. In re-examining central facets of Samburu politics – which are best known through Paul Spencer's seminal analysis of the gerontocratic aspects of Samburu political life – I suggest that the status and identities of Samburu men are in fundamental ways defined through their relationship to women as providers of food within Samburu households. Comparative material from the Nuer suggests, additionally, the strategic use of food by women in influencing male 'political spheres'. In comparing these cases, I suggest a more general model through which domestic processes of food allocation as realms of female-centred social action may be seen to play a central role in the forms and processes of pastoral 'political' life.     

Pride,personality, and the evolutionary foundations of human social status

Based on evolutionary logic, Henrich and Gil-White [Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196] distinguished between two routes to attaining social status in human societies: dominance, based on intimidation, and prestige, based on the possession of skills or expertise. Independently, emotion researchers Tracy and Robins [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 506–525] demonstrated two distinct forms of pride: hubristic and authentic. Bridging these two lines of research, this paper examines whether hubristic and authentic pride, respectively, may be part of the affective-motivational suite of psychological adaptations underpinning the status-obtaining strategies of dominance and prestige. Support for this hypothesis emerged from two studies employing self-reports (Study 1), and self-and peer-reports of group members on collegiate athletic teams (Study 2). Results from both studies showed that hubristic pride is associated with dominance, whereas authentic pride is associated with prestige. Moreover, the two facets of pride are part of a larger suite of distinctive psychological traits uniquely associated with dominance or prestige. Specifically, dominance is positively associated with traits such as narcissism, aggression, and disagreeableness, whereas prestige is positively associated with traits such as genuine self-esteem, agreeableness, conscientiousness, achievement, advice-giving, and prosociality. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of pride and social status, and the interrelations among emotion, personality, and status attainment.