Social Complexity in the Making

A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea

Donald Tuzin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415228992
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134584536
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social Complexity in the Making is a highly accessible ethnography which explains the history and evolution of Ilahita, an Arapesh-speaking village in the interior Sepik region of northeastern New Guinea. This village, unlike others in the region, expanded at an uncharacteristically fast rate more than a century ago and has maintained its large size (more than 1500) and importance until the present day. The fascinating story of how Ilahita became this size and how organizational innovations evolved there to absorb internal pressures for disintegration, bears on a question debated ever since Plato raised it: what does it take for people to live together in harmony?
Anthropologist David Tuzin, drawing on more than two years fieldwork in the village, studies the reasons behind this unusual population growth. He discovers the behaviour and policies of the Tambaran, the all-male society which was the back bone of Ilahitan society, and examines the effect of the outside influences such as World War II on the village.
This work is a unique example of an anthropological case study which will be widely used amongst undergraduates and academics. It provides an excellent insight into techniques of ethnography and contributes to a deeper understanding of what makes a society evolve (and/or collapse).

1 Introduction

From what Anthony Forge had told me, the problem to investigate in Ilahita was plainly two-fold: how did the village become so unusually large, and how did it remain intact? Although these research questions may seem obvious, they were not the sorts of questions social anthropologists working in New Guinea had been asking. Some discussion, it is true, was occurring among area specialists about the limitations of New Guinea settlement size, but the issue was phrased in functional rather than historical or evolutionary terms (e.g. Lepervanche 1967/8; Forge 1972a; Watson 1963). That is to say, their questions were not about how social systems change through time. They were of the type: what combination of environmental factors, cultural values, social structures, or normative practices prevent most New Guinea settlements from growing beyond about 300 inhabitants? My challenge was to discover how a particular village overcame similar restrictions; because, presumably, the village had not always been unusually large, the problem presenting itself was at once functionalist and historical. Before introducing Ilahita and the main features of the study, some historical and theoretical background is in order.

Struggling with the past

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, so-called primitive societies were implicitly treated as timeless, unchanging, lacking in history. In part, this was a reaction against the prior excesses of Victorian scholarship, which offered sweeping speculations about humanity's rise, through progressive stages, from Savagery to Civilization (e.g. Tyler 1871; Morgan 1877).¹ The earlier, evolutionist approaches were universalistic in that they posited (1) that all humans are comparably endowed with potentials for thought, emotion, and inventiveness capacities essential to the development of culture; and (2) that the assumed straight-line sequence of cultural advancement is common to all humans, although peoples differ in the distance they have progressed along it. According to that view, primitives living today display not biological inferiority, but an arrested state of moral, social, or technological development. To behold such people, then, is to glimpse our own past; they are our “contemporary ancestors.” For scholars interested in the prehistory of human civilization — the history that preceded written documents — the “time-warp” opportunity afforded by contemporary primitives was the main reason for studying them.

Thus motivated, the activity of collecting information about primitive peoples gathered momentum during the final four decades of the nineteenth century. The more scholars learned about non-Western peoples, however, the more they became interested in them in their own right, independent of the desire to reconstruct our own early beginnings. From this interest, anthropology emerged as an independent scholarly discipline.

With the accumulation of ethnographic knowledge, it became apparent that the idea of universal stages of cultural evolution was inadequate. The fact is, even the most seemingly “primitive” peoples have histories as long as our own. Just as our culture is more or less integrated, and more or less adapted to the physical and social environments, so are theirs. If their arrangements are in many (though not all) respects simpler than ours, it is not because they are evolutionarily stunted, but because their adaptation is adequate for survival under the prevailing conditions and has not been noticeably affected by pressures that would cause it to change (Service 1971: 7).

With the realization that non-Western cultures have social integrity and moral coherence all their own, came a shift from universalism to particularism in anthropological inquiry; to a recognition that, before it is possible to make reliable pan-human generalizations, it is necessary to understand cultural transformations in their local settings (Boas 1896). How does social system A turn into social system B? If we can't answer that question for some society deep in the Amazonian rainforest, we have no business trying to answer more abstract versions that could be asked of the entire human species.

The problem was, how does one inquire into the local history of a people when that history is unwritten? Historians rely largely on written documents as their lens on the past; what is the equivalent in non-literate settings? Of course, all peoples have oral accounts of their past, and these can be helpful. But caution is needed: once events of the past exceed living memory, such representations frequently take on a legendary or even mythic character, making it difficult to regard them as truthful depictions of what actually happened in bygone times. Symbolic analysis can sometimes decipher these accounts in ways that suggest underlying historical realities; but, at best, such exercises produce only plausible speculations. For the most part, without corroborative evidence the past exists only as a construction of the present — with all the tinkering that implies rather than as something that can be independently determined. Consequently, it was not long before the call for “local history” became an empty slogan, as anthropologists came increasingly to their object of study as a culture at a “snapshot” in time: a timeless moment known as the “ethnographic present” — a useful but potentially mischievous concept, in that it seems to admit the reality of history, while actually disregarding or denying it.

In American cultural anthropology, the problem of what to do about history was concealed by the prevalence of studies dealing with Native American peoples. Starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, American scholars urgently undertook to record native customs and languages before they died out altogether, as they were doing at an alarming rate. “History” in that context was equivalent to determining what those cultures were like before being traumatized by White contact. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Eggan 1937, 1950; Fox 1967) the question of how chat (pre-Columbian) condition itself came about, was, in practice, inaccessible to inquiry and of secondary importance, though American scholars did continue to profess an interest in history.

In British social anthropology, the neglect of history took a different, more radical turn. Reacting, as well, against the excesses of nineteenth-century speculations about the distant past, British scholars developed an alternative that reflected their different field experiences, which were closely tied to colonial circumstances. Colonial authorities, for the most part, did not seek drastic alterations in the indigenous societies coming under their control. Rather, under a policy known as “Indirect Rule,” their mission was to bring order and British law to these regions, functioning as an ultimate authority but interfering as little as possible with customary rulers and practices. The system rarely operated as smoothly as it was supposed to do; but it did enable British ethnographers to observe social traditions that were relatively intact and functioning, not the shattered remnants available to most American researchers, who arrived only after the cavalry had left.

From these circumstances, British anthropology developed an “organic” conception of social systems (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1952). Institutions, consisting of clusters of statuses, roles, and conventions, comprised the structures, or “organs” of the social “body.” Each was specialized to a particular domain of activity (e.g. economics, politics, religion); the “physiological” counterpart was the functional interactions of the various institutions. Through these interactions, each institution contributed to the maintenance of the body social. A satisfactory analysis consisted of identifying the structures and processes through which a particular society sustained itself in the here and now. Such an analysis is known as “synchronic” (single-time), as distinct from “diachronic” analysis, which seeks to understand society as it changes through real time. In its most influential form, the British theoretical position was known as “structural-functionalism.”

History, much less evolutionary history, had no place in such a scheme; we still did not know how a society moved from A to B. Speculative reconstruction was discredited, oral history was unreliable. Instead, went the view, let the emphasis be on what is more attainable: knowledge of how living societies operate and generalizations about social systems that can be drawn from the world of ethnographic instances. Not only was history methodologically excluded, but with the refinement of its concepts British anthropology came to analyze non-literate societies as if they had no history. Not that a certain amount of lip service wasn't given to the merits of evolutionist inquiry. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, the master theorist of structural-functionalism, in his 1940 presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, conceded that “social evolution is a reality which the social anthropologist should recognize and study” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 203). Like organic evolution, he explained, social evolution

can be defined by two features. There has been a process by which, from a small number of forms of social structure, many different forms have arisen in the course of history; that is, there has been a process of diversification. Secondly, throughout this process more complex forms of social structures have developed out of, or replaced, simpler forms.

Just how structural systems are to be classified with reference to their greater or lesser complexity is a problem requiring investigation.

(ibid.)

Unfortunately, neither Radcliffe-Brown nor his students undertook such an investigation. Social evolution remained an eccentric old uncle living in the past, sometimes humored, but made to spend most of his time in the attic of social anthropology. Thus was anthropological awareness diverted from one of society's most prominent features: incessant change in adaptive response to internal and external contingencies. Only by appreciating these dimensions can we adequately comprehend not merely social dynamics in the here and now of Radcliffe-Brown's imagination, but the way in which historical circumstances selectively affect social systems, and do indeed move them from A to B.

Archaeology's challenge

During the height of structural-functionalism's proud indifference to history and evolution (c. 1945–70), and despite the persisting scholarly contempt for social-evolutionary inquiry, archaeologists continued their long-standing search for models that would illuminate social transformations in the distant past. Then as now, the major questions concerned the factors that gave rise to pristine early states in the ancient Near East, Egypt, China, South Asia, Mesoamerica, and Peru. Such studies faced formidable practical and conceptual challenges: reliance on the evidence of physical remains, thus favoring materialist and/or ecological explanations to the relative exclusion of ideological factors; and, the need to embrace vast temporal and spatial spans, thus favoring very general characterizations of social-evolutionary sequences and functional relationships. For example, when V. Gordon Childe (1950) spoke of the “Urban Revolution” as marking the emergence of states, or, more abstractly, when Leslie White (1959) spoke of sociocultural complexity arising from the increasingly efficient capture and deployment of energy, one could not disagree so much as shrug in recognition of the unhelpful, tautological truth of the generalization. Such is the fate of most universalistic explanations.

Those notions were a beginning, however. In the succeeding decades archaeology refined its understanding of state formation not only through further field studies, along with technical and conceptual advances of its own, but through increased intellectual collaboration with the relatively few sociocultural anthropologists willing to admit to an interest in evolution. The idea behind this collaboration has been to apply insights drawn from anthropological theory and ethnography to the explanation of changes that occurred in the past: the flesh of the present married to the bones of the past. Kent V. Flannery, for example, combining archaeological findings from Mesoamerica with ideas from social anthropology, interposes between Childe's “Neolithic Revolution” and “Urban Revolution,” a “Rank Revolution” (Flannery 1994), thus adding the important element of ideology to an otherwise starkly materialist construction of past developments. How and under what conditions do principles of hierarchy develop in “egalitarian” societies that had previously known status distinctions based only on sex and age? This is precisely the sort of question, difficult to answer from the material record alone, that invites collaboration between archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists.

Similarly, while it is perhaps logical that dense, sedentary populations tend to be associated with substantial food-producing technologies, the precise mechanisms connecting population and subsistence are often not obvious in the archaeological record, but may be illuminated through inferences drawn from the study of living groups. And again, few would deny that population size and societal complexity are functionally related; but this unadorned correlation begs questions of causality, cognition, motivation, agency, and intentionality to which ethnography may have something to contribute. And yet, for reasons just discussed, few ethnographers examine the dynamics of these variables in historical time, in ways that archaeologists might find useful.

The trouble with types

Before suggesting how the story of Ilahita might qualify as instructive in these respects, I must address a prominent theme in studies of social evolution during recent decades, one that has created problems sometimes reminiscent of those of nineteenth-century evolutionism: the adumbration of sociocultural types and typological arrays, also known as taxonomies. Sociocultural types consist of distinctive bundles of functionally interrelated features; they are “ideal” in the sense that they are conceptual constructs which do not suppose that any given society will conform exactly to the type. For example, hunting and gathering subsistence, small local-group sizes, high mobility, kinship-based social organization, an emphasis on sharing among group members these and other features are typical of band-level societies. The most commonly used typology identifies and distinguishes bands, segmentary societies,² chiefdoms, and states (BSCS). Depending on the author, different criteria may be emphasized; but, in a nutshell, the sequence ranges from the simplest to the most complex societal types.

Typologies are conceptual scaffoldings that enable us to organize, classify, and compare divers and variable sociocultural phenomena. Without typologies, cross-cultural comparison and generalization would be impossible or at least very haphazard. For example, in southern Africa a population geneticist, caring about propinquity rather than societal scale, might usefully compare the band-level, hunter-gatherer San with the nearby Swazi, who belong to a kingdom of farmers, pastoralists, and others numbering in the hundreds of thousands. For the sociocultural anthropologist, however, a more fruitful comparison might proceed from the matching of societies of similar scale, such as the San and, say, the band-level hunter-gatherer In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The setting
• 3 History
• 4 How Ilahita got big
• 5 Residence structures
• 6 The dual organization
• 7 The ritual road to hierarchy
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index