Jacques LeMoyne and the Timucua Indians

Jacques le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533–1588) was a French artist and member of Jean Ribault's expedition to the New World. In 1564 Ribault's men established a fort at the mouth of the St. Johns River near modern Jacksonville, Florida. They remained less than a year, until they were attacked and driven out by the Spanish. The Spanish then established St. Augustine to hold this part of their empire against future interlopers. (Chief Outina marches to war covered in red war paint)

That region was inhabited by Indians the Europeans called Timucua, and one mostly sees de Bry's work these days in ethnographic works on Indian life. I have a little project in Florida right now, which is how I happened to be looking at his stuff. (Chief Outina's sorcerer contorts himself as he predicts the outcome of a battle)

The works that made Le Moyne famous were engravings published by Theodore de Bry, which is what I show here. These are supposed to have been based on drawings by Le Moyne. But they are not quite an eye-witness account of the New World. Most of le Moyne's original drawings were destroyed in the Spanish attack, so he recreated them from memory back in Europe. Plus de Bry's engravings always look like his own work, not really anybody else's, and he tended to make things much more classical and orderly than in the originals. So these represent le Moyne's experience, but filtered though his memory and then through de Bry's engraving style. (Indians hunting deer)

This engraving depicts a pillar that the French set up to represent their king's sovereignty, and it shows Indians worshiping the pillar as a god. This is one of the more controversial engravings. For one thing, the French are not likely to have set up such an elaborate pillar in their crude log and dirt fort, and why would the Indians worship it anyway? On the other hand the engravings consistently show the Indian chiefs as taller than the Frenchmen, which is how le Moyne described things in his text.

Chief Satouriona prepares for battle. Two containers of water are used in the ritual. One container is splashed over the men with the prayer to the sun that the enemy's blood will likewise be splashed over them. The second container is poured over the fire in the hope that the enemy will be extinguished as the fire is extinguished.

Using fire arrows to set an enemy village on fire.

Trophies and ceremonies after a victory.

Widows ritually mourning before the king, asking him to provide for their families and avenge the deaths of their husbands.

A Harvest Offering. According to le Moyne's text, the Indians took the skin of the largest stag they could catch and stuffed it with all their favorite foods and hoisted it up as an offering.

Women carrying baskets of food to the public storehouse.

And one of le Moyne's drawings, Three Timucuan Women. The whole set of engravings is here.

Shamanism and Sanity

One thing primitive tribes around the world have in common is the pursuit of ecstasy, the complete escape from the external world into a dreamscape universe. For some reason most advanced agricultural societies turned against the hallucinogenic drugs and savage rituals that generate these states; since the Bronze Age humans have mostly limited themselves to mild stimulants and the numbing effects of alcohol.

Recently scientists and doctors, frustrated by their inability to cure the widespread anxiety and depression that are among the worst banes of modern life, have taken renewed interest in mind-altering drugs. Study after study has shown that in certain circumstances they make certain people feel much, much better. I have written here about using ketamine to treat depression, and just yesterday MDMA to use post-traumatic stress disorder. Today there is news of a new study that found success using psilocybin to treat depression in cancer patients.

I feel certain that there is something to these studies. After all the desire for mind-altering drugs is so widespread among humankind (and also other species) that it must be a response to a biological need. Evolution, it seems, does not care how you feel, and in fact it sometimes achieves its ends by making you feel really awful. And sometimes there is nothing we can do to resolve those stresses through action. Hence, drugs.

But I would make two big caveats about all this good news. One is that while these drugs may help some people, they don't help everyone, and sometimes they hurt a lot. The "bad trip" is a big part of LSD lore because it really happens. Sometimes the bad effects persist for a long time. Richard Feynman, a bad-boy physicist who reveled in defying the man, recounted in his memoirs that although he was always fascinated by ecstatic experiences he decided in the end not to try LSD. He had read and heard too many believable accounts of people who suffered long-term mental damage to take the risk. Of course if you are so crippled by depression or anxiety that you can't function, or if you are slowly dying of cancer, your calculus might be different.

The other caveat is that making these drugs available medically will inevitably make them more available on the street, and it will also inevitably invite more people to self-medicate with them rather than seeking professional help. Any drug that helps you feel better can lead to dependence. We are living with the profound bad effects of making pain medication more available for people who are really suffering, and making psilocybin a common crutch for the troubled would probably be another disaster.

There are few unalloyed goods in the world; everything else comes with a downside. Given how many people suffer now from mysterious mental woes, and how many of them have already screwed themselves up with alcohol or opiates, I think making hallucinogens and hypnotics more available is worth the risk.

Belief in Witchcraft Impedes Economic Progress

Summary of an article titled "Trust and Witchcraft Beliefs in Sub Saharan Africa."

Believing in witchcraft is a salient feature of daily life in many parts of the world. In worst-case scenarios, such beliefs lead to murder, and they may also cause destruction of property or societal ostracism of the accused witches. The first large-scale economics study to explore beliefs in witchcraft, broadly defined as the use of supernatural techniques to harm others or acquire wealth, links such beliefs to the erosion of social capital.

Where witchcraft beliefs are widespread, American University Economics Professor Boris Gershman found high levels of mistrust exist among people. Gershman also found a negative relationship between witchcraft beliefs and other metrics of social capital relied upon for a functioning society, including religious participation and charitable giving.

It's long been argued that witchcraft beliefs impede economic progress and disrupt social relations, and Gershman's statistical analysis supports that theory. From a policy perspective, Gershman's results emphasize the importance of accounting for local culture when undertaking development projects, especially those that require communal effort and cooperation. Gershman and other social scientists believe that education can help foster improved trust and decrease the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs.

"Education may contribute to an environment with higher levels of trust and mutual assistance, insofar as it helps to promote a rational worldview and reduce the attribution of any misfortune in life to the supernatural evil forces of other people in the community," Gershman said. 

Returning Soldiers and a Divided America

Sebastien Junger has published a book expanding on an argument he first made last year: that our returning soldiers suffer not so much from combat fatigue as the dramatic contrast between the camaraderie of military life and the anomie of contemporary America:

After months of combat, during which “soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion and politics within their platoon,” they return to the United States to find “a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about — depending on their views — the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president or the entire U.S. government.”

It’s a formula for deep despair. “Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country,” he writes, “they’re not sure how to live for it.” . . .

Mr. Junger’s premise is simple: Modern civilization may be swell, giving us unimaginable autonomy and material bounty. But it has also deprived us of the psychologically invaluable sense of community and interdependence that we hominids enjoyed for millions of years. It is only during moments of great adversity that we come together and enjoy that kind of fellowship — which may explain why, paradoxically, we thrive during those moments.

War, too, for all of its brutality and ugliness, satisfies some of our deepest evolutionary yearnings for connectedness. Platoons are like tribes. They give soldiers a chance to demonstrate their valor and loyalty, to work cooperatively, to show utter selflessness. Is it any wonder that so many of them say they miss the action when they come home? . . .

Our veterans re-enter an unstable working class. They are awkwardly thanked by strangers for their service — which, as Mr. Junger ruefully observes, only highlights the schism between the few who have served and the great many who have not. And instead of jobs, they are offered lifelong disability.

Soldiers go from a world in which they’re united, interconnected and indispensable to one in which they’re isolated, without purpose, and bombarded with images of politicians and civilians screaming at one another on TV.

“How,” Mr. Junger asks, “do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place?”

This brings me back to a comment David made yesterday: given that Americans are so fundamentally divided against each other, is it worth trying to keep the country together? I have lately heard several people arguing for a more relaxed national system and more power for the states, so that each community can be governed as it wants. I am not attracted to this notion, because I think that any unit large enough to function in the modern age is going to be highly diverse. Up here in the blue northeast we tend to think of Georgia and Texas as conservative southern states with a sort of unified outlook, but of course that isn't really true. Both have large black and Hispanic populations and both contain millions of liberals. It's just that with the country as a whole so closely divided in politics, a state that is 66% Republican seems unified by comparison.

I think we are stuck with our divisions. But I do wish we were more polite about them. Which is why I regard Donald Trump as such a danger and am increasingly frustrated with Bernie Sanders.

Scarlet Macaws, Hero Twins, and Pueblo Ancestors

The American Southwest may be the most intensely studied archaeological zone in the world. Because so much work has been done at such a high level, in a desert zone where there is often good preservation of bone and wood, and there are descendant communities (Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo) who preserve many ancient traditions, marvelous things can sometimes be done with the data.

Consider one fascinating sidelight, the importance of parrots and especially the scarlet macaw in southwestern myth, ritual and art.

Scarlet macaws are native to the central American jungle, and their food is tropical fruit that can't be found in the desert. Yet thousands of parrot skeletons have been found on southwestern archaeological sites, most of them probably scarlet macaws. Their feathers are still treasured for key rituals associated with the sun, as they certainly were in ancient times. The Hopi and Zuni both have Macaw Clans.

These strange structures from the site of Paquime or Casas Grande in northern Mexico were dubbed "macaw pens" by their excavator and some archaeologists still think that is what they are.

Just the other day I dug out a 2014 issue of American Antiquity for a different purpose but found myself distracted by an article on scarlet macaws in the Mimbres region. The Mimbres is a river in southwestern New Mexico. In its valley, around 1100 CE, arose a culture called the Classic Mimbres  most notable for its amazing pottery. Mimbres pottery is not abstract like most other southwestern wares, but figural, and among the figures depicted on Mimbres pots are macaws.

Many, many macaws.

Where did all these macaws come from? Because their food was not available in the desert, it would have been very difficult to keep them alive and healthy. Finds of macaw egg shells, especially around the macaw pens at Paquime, show that some macaws laid eggs in these desert towns. But they cannot have reproduced themselves very well and the population would have needed constant replenishment with new birds from the jungle. Besides, most of the bird skeletons seem to represent young adults who had been sacrificed when they had just reached maturity, quite likely at the spring equinox.

The macaws were not the only connection between the southwest and the Maya. I wrote here back in 2011 about the trade of southwestern turquoise for Maya chocolate. Besides the macaw pens, Paquime also has two central American-style ball courts (above).

Much Mimbres pottery depicts what appear to be scenes from myth, in particular the myth of the Hero Twins. Heroic twins are known in many parts of the world, but the Hero Twins of the southwest have too much in common with those of the Maya to represent 10,000-year-old memories. Somebody, it seems, carried stories about the twins back and forth between the Maya jungles and the southwestern deserts. Macaws and their feathers, incidentally, feature prominently in many Maya tales of the Hero Twins.

So how did the southwestern macaw thing get started? Most likely, around the year 1100 some pilgrim from Mimbres walked to the Maya heartland to be initiated into their esoteric lore. He or she then walked back to Mimbres, bringing along new stories of the hero twins, new knowledge, and a scarlet macaw in a cage. Other pilgrims followed, perhaps dozens, perhaps hundreds. In Mimbres, the people abandoned the underground shrines known as Great Kivas where they had worshiped and moved their rituals to new outdoor plazas. (To archaeologists, a change in the buildings used for worship is the most dramatic evidence of religious or ideological change.) Macaw feathers became the symbols of initiates into a new cult of the hero twins and their avatars, the sun and the moon. Those pioneering pilgrims were remembered, and in a garbled way their stories still survive – several Indian tribes and clans have tales of people who traveled far to the south, to the land of the sun, and returned with new rituals and lore.

The bird bones, the pottery, the lore – it all fits together in an amazing way.

Patricia Gilman, Marc Thompson, and Kristina Wyckoff, Ritual Change and the Distant: Mesoamerican Iconography, Scarlet Macaws, and Great Kivas in the Mimbres Region of Southwestern New Mexico. American Antiquity 79(1) 2014.

Monkey Inequality

Capuchin monkeys, it seems, do not take it kindly when one monkey has more than the others:

Punishment of non-cooperators is important for the maintenance of large-scale cooperation in humans, but relatively little is known about the relationship between punishment and cooperation across phylogeny. The current study examined second-party punishment behavior in a nonhuman primate species known for its cooperative tendencies—the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella). We found that capuchins consistently punished a conspecific partner who gained possession of a food resource, regardless of whether the unequal distribution of this resource was intentional on the part of the partner. A non-social comparison confirmed that punishment behavior was not due to frustration, nor did punishment stem from increased emotional arousal. Instead, punishment behavior in capuchins appears to be decidedly social in nature, as monkeys only pursued punitive actions when such actions directly decreased the welfare of a recently endowed conspecific. This pattern of results is consistent with two features central to human cooperation: spite and inequity aversion, suggesting that the evolutionary origins of some human-like punitive tendencies may extend even deeper than previously thought.

So the monkeys go after any other monkey who stumbles onto a food windfall until the extra food is shared. And they don't do this because they are hungry or angry, but just because that is what capuchin monkeys do.

Certain human hunter-gatherers do the same thing; a hunter among these people who doesn't want to share his catch evenly with everyone has to eat it before he comes back to camp.

I think about this whenever I ponder human inequality. If we really want a more equal world, we have to stop rewarding people who get rich with adulation and attention and start snubbing them until they share more.

Spring Equinox at Horseshoe Mesa, Arizona

Horseshoe Mesa in Arizona contains an impressive array of ancient Indian petroglyphs. It has recently been confirmed that one rock face there is carved in a way that marks the equinox; at noon the "shadow dagger" at upper right cuts through a spiral design.

This not a very big rock face, and very few people can see this phenomenon at one time. But this is not unusual among American Indians. Many North American petroglyphs were carved by lone men or women, sometimes as part of vision quests or other personal acts. I wonder if this particular equinox sign was the personal creation of one person, perhaps a shaman, for use in a personal ritual tied to his or her own visions.

Menopause and Leadership among Killer Whales

Killer whales and humans are among the very few animals that undergo menopause. Researchers have been trying to figure out how menopause relates to orca social structure:

Pods are matrilineal, composed of old females, their offspring and their daughters’ offspring. There aren’t many old males, Croft said, because there’s a huge disparity in life expectancy, with males living to about 40 and females up to around 100.

At about the same age that the males expire, female killer whales go through menopause. The only other female mammals known to have long post-reproductive lives are pilot whales and humans. Most other animals reproduce until they are near death.

Fatherhood is not part of whale life. Neither is bonding between mates. Males will mate with females in neighboring pods but stay with their own families. The supreme, permanent bond in killer whale society is between mothers and their sons. All offspring stay with their moms throughout life, but the mothers put more energy into caring for the sons. Research in 2012 showed that males tend to die shortly after their mothers die. In 2015, researchers published observations that the older females lead their pods to find the most promising hunting grounds.

Among the whales, menopause seems to get older whales to focus on helping their growing offspring, especially their sons, find food and reproduce:

In some species, individuals are more likely to propagate their genes if they have fewer offspring but invest more in their survival and their success in reproducing. One of the most popular ideas to explain human menopause is the so-called grandmother hypothesis, which posits that older women keep promoting their genetic legacies by helping with grandchildren. In whales, it looks like the older females help the whole pod, which is made up of their kin. They also invest time in helping their grown sons find food, which could be a way to ensure that they have more grand-offspring.

Of course in humans some men also lead very long lives, which also needs explanation. In some societies at least older women and men serve as repositories of knowledge; for example old people may remember storms or droughts of rare severity, so the lessons of survival are not lost.

The Wave Pilots

Fascinating look at how people in the Marshall Islands used to navigate around these remote specks of land by feeling the waves:

The Marshalls provide a crucible for navigation: 70 square miles of land, total, comprising five islands and 29 atolls, rings of coral islets that grew up around the rims of underwater volcanoes millions of years ago and now encircle gentle lagoons. These green dots and doughnuts make up two parallel north-south chains, separated from their nearest neighbors by a hundred miles on average. Swells generated by distant storms near Alaska, Antarctica, California and Indonesia travel thousands of miles to these low-lying spits of sand. When they hit, part of their energy is reflected back out to sea in arcs, like sound waves emanating from a speaker; another part curls around the atoll or island and creates a confused chop in its lee. Wave-piloting is the art of reading — by feel and by sight — these and other patterns. Detecting the minute differences in what, to an untutored eye, looks no more meaningful than a washing-machine cycle allows a ri-meto, a person of the sea in Marshallese, to determine where the nearest solid ground is — and how far off it lies — long before it is visible.

Sadly this knowledge is nearly extinct, and you have to wonder how long it will survive in a world of cheap GPS devices.

Bone Dagger, New Guinea

From the Cavin Morris Gallery

The More Vengeful Your God, the More Cooperative Your Society

Or so says this study:

Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded. This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms. Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers. We tested this hypothesis using extensive ethnographic interviews and two behavioural games designed to measure impartial rule-following among people (n = 591, observations = 35,400) from eight diverse communities from around the world: (1) inland Tanna, Vanuatu; (2) coastal Tanna, Vanuatu; (3) Yasawa, Fiji; (4) Lovu, Fiji; (5) Pesqueiro, Brazil; (6) Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius; (7) the Tyva Republic (Siberia), Russia; and (8) Hadzaland, Tanzania. Participants reported adherence to a wide array of world religious traditions including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as notably diverse local traditions, including animism and ancestor worship. Holding a range of relevant variables constant, the higher participants rated their moralistic gods as punitive and knowledgeable about human thoughts and actions, the more coins they allocated to geographically distant co-religionist strangers relative to both themselves and local co-religionists. Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.

Cultural Appropriation in Paleolithic Africa

I've never understood why cultural appropriation is a bad thing, because borrowing from other cultures is pretty much what humans do. These South African archaeologists argue that it was key to our progress in the Paleolithic:

This sharing of symbolic material culture and technology also tells us more about Homo sapiens' journey from Africa to Arabia and Europe. Contact between cultures has been vital to the survival and development of our common ancestors. The more contact the groups had, the stronger their technology and culture became.

"Contact across groups, and population dynamics, makes it possible to adopt and adapt new technologies and culture and is what describes Homo sapiens. What we are seeing is the same pattern that shaped the people in Europe who created cave art many years later," Henshilwood says.

The more contact the groups had, the stronger their technology and culture became.

Jared Diamond spent a lot of time wandering around New Guinea with local guides, and in The World Until Yesterday has a wonderful account of how new Guineans interacted with people from other areas. One regular topic of conversation was plants – what do you call this vine? what is it good for? can you eat these berries? how do you prepare that medicine? It shows perfectly how cultural exchange happens, and how fundamental it is to human nature.

Napoleon Chagnon and "Liberal McCarthyism"

From a rather nasty screed against liberal academics in the Spectator, I extract a nugget that I think deserves a response:

Which makes it all the more ironic that McCarthyism is alive and well and being practiced by the liberal intelligentsia. . . . [Consider] the punishment meted out to Napoleon Chagnon, the evolutionary anthropologist whose work on the indigenous population of the Amazonian rain forest challenged liberal pieties about the goodness of man in his prelapsarian state. Chagnon was essentially blacklisted by the people who control the anthropology industry.

It is certainly true, as I have written, that many anthropologists hate Napoleon Chagnon, and one of them actually wrote a nasty book about him full of false accusations. (It also contained several true accusations, of which more in a minute.)

What the Spectator gets wrong is why anthropologists hate Chagnon. Chagnon is not hated because he believes that our ancestry is violent; plenty of respectable tenured anthropologists think that. He is not hated because he thinks violence has been a successful evolutionary strategy for humans; plenty of tenured anthropologists think that, too. To be fair, his evolutionary theories probably haven't helped him, but they are not the main reason he is so controversial.

Anthropologists hate Chagnon because of the way he interacted with the people he studied. Most American anthropologists consider themselves to be, first and foremost, advocates for indigenous or oppressed peoples, and advocates more broadly for the preservation of cultural diversity. Chagnon despised that sort of thing, which he called "fluff." He considered himself an evolutionary scientist, and he made no secret of his dislike for the subjects of his studies. As he famously said,

Real Indians sweat, they smell bad, they take hallucinogenic drugs, they belch after they eat, they covet and at times steal their neighbour’s wife, they fornicate, and they make war.

Most anthropologists want to get to know the people they study on their own terms, to become as much as possible part of their society. Chagnon had no time for that; in pursuit of the information he wanted he routinely violated taboos, exacerbated social tensions, threatened violence, and more. He caused so much trouble that the government of Venezuela eventually banned him from the country. He called the Yanomamö the "fierce people," but many of them feared him.

Over my adult lifetime theory has not really excited academics very much. What matters is politics in a more down-to-earth sense: where do you stand on global inequality, pollution, trans rights, oil exploration in the rain forest, and other particular causes. Your theories about anthropology are much less important, and in fact if you are the right sort of anarchistic leftist you can say whatever you want about human evolution. I personally have no fear of offering any sort of theory about the periods I study, but I could conceivably get in all sorts of trouble for opposing the rights of Indian Tribes to control the treatment of ancient Indian skeletons. That sort of concern for the beliefs and desires of living groups of people is what the left cares about now.

David Graeber, Debt: the First 5,000 Years

Debt: the First 5,000 Years is an endlessly fascinating book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not because I agreed with every word; many passages are maddening, and I think that in some ways it is very much wrong-headed. But it is full of fabulous facts and keen insights, and the topic is of central importance, so I absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in what the world is like and how it got this way. Given the amount of time and space it covers — 3000 BCE to the present, across much of the globe — it is no doubt full of errors, some of them beyond my competence to recognize. Still, for the times and places I do know I found it as good as any textbook, and where I disagreed about factual matters I never thought the errors really undermined the argument.

David Graeber is an anthropologist who did fieldwork in Madagascar before getting involved in the protest movement against the IMF and its austerity policies. He found that when he tried to argue that the debts owed by many poor countries to foreign banks were unjust, people would respond with a simple moral parable: but surely one has to pay one's debts! This set Graeber wondering. What is it about debt that we find so morally compelling? When a corrupt dictator borrows money and squanders it, and is then overthrown in a democratic revolution, why is the new democracy saddled with repayment of the dictator's bills? Why are these debts passed on to the grandchildren of the people who borrowed the money? Why is paying our debits a sacred duty? Graeber tried to answer this question by exploring the origins of debt, money, and markets. How did they arise, and how did they evolve into the institutions we know today? This takes him on a journey that touches Sumerian temple administration, the Biblical jubilee of debt forgiveness, African marriage practices, the slave trade, Chinese philosophy, Indian empires, Greek populist revolts, Roman taxation, and more. I loved the historical parts of the book, which as I said make up most of it.

Graeber begins by discussing a bit of nonsense from the economics textbooks. These tomes often explain the origin of money by fables like this:

One can imagine an old-style farmer bartering with the blacksmith, the tailor, the grocer, and the doctor in his small town. For simple barter to work, however, there must be a double coincidence of wants . . . . Henry has potatoes and wants shoes, Joshua has a extra pair of shoes and wants potatoes. Bartering can make them both happier. But if Henry has firewood Joshua does not need any of that, then bartering for Joshua's shoes requires one or both of them to go searching for more people in the hope of making a multilateral exchange. Money provides a way to make multilateral exchange much simpler. Henry sells his firewood to someone else for money and uses the money to buy Joshua's shoes.

These imaginary republics of barter fill the economics texts, starting with Adam Smith's, but actually they have never existed anywhere. What really happens in old-fashioned rural communities is that if Henry needs shoes from Joshua and has, at the moment, nothing Joshua wants, Joshua hands over the shoes and makes a note that Henry owes him. Eventually either Henry will have something Joshua wants, or a "multilateral exchange" will take place in which all the neighbors pass favors around until everyone is vaguely satisfied. How precisely these debts are calculated depends on the society. In 17th-century New England exchanged items were valued by the parties in imaginary pounds and pence (since real coins were vanishingly rare), and both parties would write the debt down in their account books (many of which survive), to be settled later. In other places the debt was kept intentionally vague, and it might even be described as a gift. In some societies the exchange would go like this:

Henry walks up to Joshua and says, "Nice shoes!"
Joshua says, "Oh, they're not much, but  since you seem to like them, by all means take them."
Henry takes the shoes.
Henry's potatoes are not at issue since both parties are perfectly well aware that if Joshua were ever short of potatoes, Henry would give him some.

Graeber puts a lot of emphasis on how wrong economists are about the origins of money because he wants to discredit their whole discipline. To him, economists misunderstand most of what happens in the world because they work from false models. Viz., those rational agents who go around calculating their self-interest. In the sorts of small communities in which people lived for most of our history, exchange took place within the context of long-term relationships. Everyone was in debt to everyone else, and nobody took this as a sign of profligacy or laziness. Graeber — like James Scott, another anthropologist and one of Graeber's personal friends — longs for that world of small communities where economic relations were subordinated to ties of kinship and neighborliness. Graeber wants to make it clear that although we often think of markets and money as natural parts of our world, they are not natural at all. They are human creations, traceable to particular historical epochs, recent compared to the ancient tradition of neighborly sharing and exchange.

Most of Debt is taken up with the question of how we got from that world to our own. Graeber's version of world history is full of violence, theft, rape, slavery, and other unpleasantries. It is a woeful tale, but then history really has been full of those things. Like most historians who have investigated the question, Graeber believes that markets in our sense were created by governments:

States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

Rather than being opposites, as Republicans like to say, states and markets are related innovations, both equally opposed to the world of traditional rural communities. And like most historians, Graeber thinks that the rise of states was very much connected to warfare. Both states and markets, in his view, arose from violence. The first widespread taxation was actually the tribute conquered peoples paid to their conquerors. Some of the first open marketplaces we know about were places where pirates and raiders sold their wares. The most widely accepted theory about the origin of coins is that they were minted to pay mercenaries.

Looming over Graeber's whole narrative is the problem of debt. Early Sumerian texts already recognized the problem of poor people losing their freedom through debts to the rich. In Old Testament Israel the prophets decreed that there must be a jubilee every seven years, in which all debts were forgiven and and debt slaves freed. In the classical world these same issues boiled over again and again. Historian Moses Finley liked to say that all revolutions in the ancient world had the same program: cancel the debts and redistribute the land. In medieval India, those reduced to slavery by debt were the majority of the population. Even among the rich, debt was often a terrible problem. When aristocrats acted with shocking greed — for example, Cortez in Mexico — we often find that they were deeply in debt and facing ruinous default.

Here is where I had my most serious problem with Graeber's approach. It is certainly true that across civilization's first 4,000 years most of the people were oppressed peasants, and that debt was one of their problems. But I am not at all certain that it was the oppression that made their lives so hard. Graeber's world is missing the iron scissors of Malthus. Peasants were poor because there were too many of them for the land and their technology. No doubt taxes and rents hurt, but I don't think they were decisive. When I scan human history I see a relentless struggle for resources, with the losers constantly being pushed out of the gene pool. Politics matters a great deal in history, but so does biology.

As my readers know, I think the basic problem with contemporary politics is that while nobody much likes our regime of financial capitalism and wage labor, nobody knows what else to do. Graeber has tried to find some answers to our problems by undertaking a fundamental look at the origins of money and debt. I think he has succeeded on the intellectual level, by inviting us to think outside the bounds of our normal political discourse. It is salutary to be reminded that people have thought very differently about things like debt and money than we do, and that debt has long been one of the main tools the powerful use to oppress the weak. But on the level of practical politics I think he has failed. In fact Graeber is one of those annoying anarchists who refuse to say what sort of institutions we should have after the revolution. Even he understands that the neighborly economy of a rural village is no solution for our age, and he never says how modern people might act on the principles it embodied. I think the clearest political implication of Graeber's work is that we should return to more liberal bankruptcy laws, but then I supported that before.

So we end up where we usually end up: the world is full of cruelty, injustice, and oppression, a state that continues because some people benefit from it and the rest don't know how to change it. On the other hand the best thing about our world is how easy it is to learn millions of fascinating things, and Graeber has certainly made a great contribution to making the world more interesting.

Wooden Mask from Nepal

From the Cavin Morris Gallery.

The Burned Witch Girl of San Calocero

In northern Italy, archaeologists working in a medieval cemetery have uncovered the skeleton of a 15-17 year old girl whose body was burned and then buried in an irregular pit; the pit was then covered with heavy stone slabs. She stood about 4' 9" tall. The grave has not yet been radiocarbon dated, and the excavators can only say that it dates to between the 9th and 14th centuries.

This is a perfect example of what archaeologists call a "deviant" burial, one that was made contrary to the stated rules of its society. Burning corpses was a taboo act in Christian Europe, punishable in some areas by death. But it was used for people who had offended so badly against the society that they had to be completely cast out: heretics, witches, women who murdered their husbands or children. Our historical accounts generally say that such people were burned alive, but I am not familiar with any burials of such victims; the ones that have been uncovered by archaeologists were dead before they went in the fire. There are enough of these to make me suspect that execution followed by the burning of the body may have been a common alternative to the legally-mandated death by fire.

I find these anomalous burials interesting in a broader sense as well. In traditional societies all over the world, informants tell anthropologists "we bury our dead like X." This is true, for example, of American Indians in the early historic period. But when archaeologists excavate cemeteries they often find several different burial methods. One graveyard of the late prehistoric culture in Ohio, the probable ancestors of the historic Shawnee and Miami, produced burials that had been cremated at another site and then moved to the grave, burials that had been cremated in the grave, unburned burials lying on their backs, and unburned burials curled on their sides. I have always wondered what led the the differences, but nobody has been able to figure it out.

House Models from Ancient Tombs

This week the Met is celebrating the opening of a little exhibit titled Design for Eternity:Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas. This set me thinking about all of the architectural models I have seen over the years, so I decided to put together a post about them. Above is a Nayarit house model from western Mexico, 100 BCE to 200 CE, the title image from the Met show.

More Nayarit houses. All of these objects come from tombs. As we will see, these objects are known from many parts of the world, and so far as I know they all come from tombs. The notion of burying the dead with small models of what they knew in life seems to have occurred to many people in diverse cultures.

Schematic greenstone temple model from the Mexcala culture, c 200 BCE to 500 CE.

Ceramic vessels from the Moche culture of Peru, c. 200 to 650 CE.

Model palace, Chimu culture, Peru, c. 1440-1665 CE.

In Japan the models buried in tombs are called Haniwa, and they take many forms: people, demons, animals, boats, houses. Most of them date between the 2nd and 7th centuries CE.

Two Egyptian models, both from around 1900 BCE.

An Egyptian town house in limestone, 600 BCE to 200 CE.

But the undisputed masters of the funerary model house were the Chinese of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE). Their models were bigger, more elaborate, and more brightly painted than anyone else's; the one above is about as tall as a person. Hundreds have been found, and Chinese museums are full of them. .

One of the most famous is this spectacular palace.

RIP Rene Girard

Rene Girard, one of the leading cultural theorists of the twentieth century, has died. Rene's thought combined a profoundly skeptical, even cynical attitude toward most of human behavior with a deep Catholic faith. Some people see these as the two sides of a coin; to Girard, faith was necessary because humanity was so depraved, and Christianity must be true because it is the beautiful negation of human ugliness.

Brian McDonald offers a simple explanation of Girard's anthropology:

Picture two young children playing happily on their porch, a pile of toys beside them. The older child pulls a G.I. Joe from the pile and immediately, his younger brother cries out, “No, my toy!”, pushes him out of the way, and grabs it. The older child, who was not very interested in the toy when he picked it up, now conceives a passionate need for it and attempts to wrest it back. Soon a full fight ensues, with the toy forgotten and the two boys busy pummeling each other.

As the fight intensifies, the overweight child next door wanders into their yard and comes up to them, looking for someone to play with. At that point, one of the two rivals looks up and says, “Oh, there’s old fat butt!” “Yeah,” says his brother. “Big fat butt!” The two, having forgotten the toy, now forget their fight and run the child back home. Harmony has been restored between the two brothers, though the neighbor is now indoors crying.

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Girard builds his whole theory of human nature and human culture through a close analysis of the dynamics operating in this story. Most human desires are not “original” or spontaneous, he argues, but are created by imitating another whom he calls the “model.” When the model claims an object, that tells another that it is desirable—and that he must have it instead of him. Girard calls this “mimetic” (or imitative) desire. In the subsequent rivalry, the two parties will come to forget the object and will come to desire the conflict for itself. Harmony will only be restored if the conflicting parties can vent their anger on a common enemy or “scapegoat.”

With the lucidity characteristic of French thought before the “deconstructionist” writers, and a consistency reminiscent of Calvin, Girard shows, throughout the body of his work, how his theory of “mimetic” desire can illuminate and unify an extraordinarily disparate set of human phenomena. It can explain everything from sacrifice to conflict, from mythology to Christianity.

Mimetic desire accounts for the nature of human culture. Early human cultures, thinks Girard, must have been marked by violence as mimetic desire drew human beings into unceasing conflict. Ultimately, the object would disappear from view and be replaced by the conflict itself. Thus, most conflicts, either ancient or modern, are almost literally over “nothing,” with essentially identical rivals seeking only the prestige that comes from achieving victory over each other.

Primitive societies would have few mechanisms for containing the spreading contagion of mimetic violence, so Girard concludes that such societies would have inevitably decimated themselves had they not found a mechanism for containing the conflict.

This mechanism he locates in another fundamental human characteristic: our propensity for “scapegoating.” At some stage in a cycle of mimetic violence, the community spontaneously turns on one of its members as the one who is to blame for it all.
While mimetic violence divides each against each, scapegoating violence unites all against one. [Girard mainly has in mind animal sacrifice - jcb] Thus the destruction of the scapegoat produces a genuinely unifying experience, the peace and relief of which makes such a profound impact that, over time, the hated scapegoat is turned into a god, and the community tries to perpetuate the peace-bringing effect of this original lynching by commemorating it ritually and sacrificially. Ultimately this ritualized violence becomes the basis for religion, mythology, kingship, and the establishment of those differences in role and status that are so essential to bring about internal peace. (Differentiation cuts down on mimetic rivalry since only “equals” can compete for the same object.)

Girard's first and still most famous book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), analyzed western literature from this perspective and found a common theme: the hero, after a career of mimetic desire, eventually realizes the falseness of that desire and turns away from it toward something deeper and more real. He said,

A great novel involves an experience that is spiritual; the novelist engages in reflection and comes to sense that his whole life has been based upon illusion. The character in a novel then experiences a conversion that involves a recognition that he is like those he despises. But this experience of the character is in reality a reflection of what has happened to the novelist. It is what makes him able to write the novel.

Girard's understanding of Christianity was, again, a sort of reversal of his emphasis on scapegoating. When an interviewer asked him to explain what he meant when he said that although the stories of Jesus appeared to be myths, they are not, he said this:

They appear to be myth because the death of Christ is presented as a sacrifice, and sacrifice of the scapegoat is the origin and theme of all mythology. But it is a sacrifice that refutes the whole principle of violence and sacrifice. God is revealed as the “arch-scapegoat,” the completely innocent one who dies in order to give life. And his way of giving life is to overthrow the religion of scapegoating and sacrifice—which is the essence of myth.

I find all of this interesting but not very convincing. Whenever anybody says that the real essence of X is Y -- e.g., the essence of paganism is scapegoating and sacrifice -- I always think, but what about everything else that does into making up paganism, from music and dance to taboos? The world as I understand it is just too complex for this sort of analysis to get us very far.

But anyway was Girard was an interesting thinker, always willing to discuss or debate his ideas with colleagues, students, or just about anyone else:

Girard took the criticism in stride: "Theories are expendable," he said in 1981. "They should be criticized. When people tell me my work is too systematic, I say, 'I make it as systematic as possible for you to be able to prove it wrong.'"

Ewe Fetish

Fetish (magical idol) from the Ewe people of central Africa, from the Cavin Morris Gallery. One shudders to think what sort of spell this was used to cast.

Happy Halloween.

Power Figure from Kongo

This is a "power figure" from the Kongo culture of central Africa, made in the nineteenth century. It depicts a canine spirit being known as Kozo. Giving it two heads emphasized its powers of perception. The central element is wood, with many iron objects driven in.

The Met is mounting a big exhibit of objects from Kongo, including a number of "power figures." But I have read through all the exhibit documentation and I still have only a vague idea what a power figure is. They are somehow used in magical operations such as curing and the testing of witnesses; they have compartments where "sacred matter" was sealed, adding to their potency. Sometimes they were used in pairs, for example male and female deities, so as to balance masculine aggression with with feminine creativity. But that's about all I can tell you. I am not sure if the vagueness is intentional, born from a desire to respect African beliefs and not pry into secrets, or if these things are just not well understood.