Dawn of everything

Dawn of everything

THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING creators and enforcers of systems of justice. Such with the Natchez too. The Great Sun was said to be descended from a child of the Sun who came to earth bearing a universal code of laws, among the most prominent of which were proscriptions against theft and murder. Yer the Great Sun himself ostentatiously violated those laws on a regular basis, as if to prove his identification with a principle prior to law and, therefore, able to create it.

The problem with this sort of power (at least, from the sovereign's vantage point) is that it tends to be intensely personal. It is almost impossible to delegate. The king's sovereignty extends about as far as the king himself can walk, reach, see or be carried. Within that circle it is absolute. Outside it, it attenuates rapidly. As a result, in the absence of an administrative system (and the Natchez king had only a handful of assistants), claims to labour, tribute or obedience could, if considered odious, be simply ignored. Even the 'absolutist' monarchs of the Renaissance, like Henry VIII or Louis XIV, had a great deal of trouble delegating their authority - that is, convincing their subjects to treat royal representatives as deserving anything like the same deference and obedience due to the king himself. Even if one does develop an administrative apparatus (as they of course did), there is the additional problem of how to get the administrators actually to do what they're told - and, by the same token, how to get anyone to tell you if they aren't. As late as the 178os, as Max Weber liked to point out, Frederick the Great of Prussia found that his repeated efforts to free the country's serfs came to nothing because bureaucrats would simply ignore the decrees or, if challenged by his legates, insisted the words of the decree should be interpreted as saying the exact opposite of what was obviously intended,60

In this sense, French observers were not entirely off the mark: the Natchez court really could be considered a sort of hyper-concentrated version of Versailles. On the one hand, the Great Sun's power in his immediate presence was even more absolute (Louis could not actually snap his fingers and order someone executed on the spot); while on the other, his ability to extend that power was even more restricted (Louis did, after all, have an administration at his disposal, though a fairly limited one compared to modern nation states). Natchez sovereignty was, effectively, bottled up. There was even a suggestion that this power, and particularly its benevolent aspect, was in some way dependent on being bottled up. According to one account, the main ritual role of the king was to seek blessings for his people - health, fertility, prosperity - from the original lawgiver, a being who in his lifetime was so terrifying and destructive that he eventually agreed to be turned into a stone statue and hidden in a temple where no one would see him.6 In a similar way, the king was sacred, and could be a conduit for such blessings, precisely insofar as he could be contained.

The Natchez case illustrates, with unusual clarity, a more general principle whereby the containment of kings becomes one of the keys to their ritual power. Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by.62

Yet that very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that High Gods' are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings.

People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power. We might not fall on our knees before any thug or bully who manages to wreak havoc with impunity (at least, if he isn't actually in the room), but insofar as such a figure does manage to establish themselves as genuinely standing above the law - in other words, as sacred or set apart - another apparently universal principle kicks in: in order to keep him apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, that same figure becomes surrounded with restrictions. Violent men generally insist on tokens of respect, but tokens of respect taken to the cosmological level - not to touch the earth', 'not to see the sun' - tend to become severe limits on one's freedom to act, violently or indeed in most other ways.63

For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects, insofar as they were not simply avoiding the kings entirely, would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces - or even, as in some of the cases of 'divine kingship' first made famous by Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, facing ritual death themselves.

So far, then, we have seen how each of the three principles we began with - violence, knowledge and charisma - could, in first-order regimes, become the basis for political structures which, in some ways, resemble what we think of as a state, but in others clearly don't. None could in any sense be described as 'egalitarian' societies - they were all organized around a very clearly demarcated elite - but at the same time, it's not at all clear how far the existence of such elites restricted the basic freedoms we described in earlier chapters. There is little reason to believe, for instance, that such regimes did much to impair freedom of movement: Natchez subjects seemed to have faced little opposition if they chose simply to move away from the proximity of the Great Sun, which they generally did. Neither do we find any clear sense of the giving or taking of orders, except in the sovereign's immediate (and decidedly limited) ambit.

Another instructive case of sovereignty without the state is found in the recent history of South Sudan, among the Shilluk, a Nilotic people living alongside the Nuer. To recap, the early-twentieth-century Nuer were a pastoral society, of the sort often referred to in the anthropological literature as 'egalitarian' (though not, in fact, entirely so), because of their extreme distaste for any situation that might even suggest the giving and taking of orders. The Shilluk speak a western Nilotic language closely related to Nuer, and most believe that at some point in the past they were one people. While the Nuer occupied lands best fit for cattle-grazing, the Shilluk found themselves living along a fertile stretch of the White Nile, which allowed them to grow the local grain known as durra, and support dense populations. How-ever, the Shilluk - unlike the Nuer - had a king. Known as the reth, this Shilluk monarch could also be seen as embodying sovereignty in the raw, in much the same way as the Natchez Great Sun.

Both the Great Sun and the Shilluk reth could act with total impu-nity, but only towards those in their immediate presence. Each normally resided in an isolated capital, where he conducted regular rituals to guarantee fertity and well-being. According to one Italian missionary, writing in the carly twentieth century.

The Reth lives isolated, as a rule, with some of his wives in the small but famous hill-village of Pacooda, known as Fashoda ... His person is sacred and can be approached only with difficulty by ordinary people, and only with elaborate etiquette by the higher class. His appearance among the people, as for a journey, is rare and awe-inspiring, so that most people used to go into hiding or keep out of his path; girls especially do so.64

The latter presumably for fear of being snatched up and carried off to the royal harem. Yet to be a royal wife was not without advantages, as the college of royal wives was effectively what substituted for an administration, maintaining connections between Fashoda and their natal villages; and it was powerful enough, if the wives came to con-sensus, to order the king's execution. Then again, the reth also had his henchmen: often these were orphans, criminals, runaways and other unattached persons who would gravitate to him. If the king attempted to mediate a local dispute and one party refused to comply, he would occasionally throw in his lot with the other side, raid the offending village and carry off what cattle and other things of value his men could get their hands on. The royal treasury thus consisted almost entirely of wealth that had been stolen, plundered in raids on foreigners or on the king's own subjects. All this might seem a pretty poor model for a free society - but in fact, in everyday affairs ordinary Shilluk appear to have maintained the same fiercely independent attitude as Nuer, and to have been just as averse to taking orders. Even the members of the higher class' (basically, descendants of earlier kings) could expect only a few gestures of deference, certainly not obedience. An old Shilluk legend sums it up nicely:

There was once a cruel king, who killed many of his subjects, he even killed women. His subiects were terrified of him. One day, to demonstrate that his subjects were so afraid they would do anything he asked, he assembled the Shilluk chiefs and ordered them to wall him up inside a house with a young girl. Then he ordered them to let him out again. They didn't. So he died.65

At chis point it should be clear that what we are really talking about, in all these cases, is not the 'birth of the state in the sense of the emer. gence, in embryonic form, of a new and unprecedented institution that would grow and evolve into modern forms of government. We are speaking instead of broad regional systems; it just happens, in the case of Egypt and the Andes, that an entire regional system became united (at least some of the time) under a single government. This was actually a fairly unusual arrangement. More common were arrangements such as those in Shang China, where unification was largely theoretical; or Mesopotamia, where regional hegemony rarely lasted for longer than a generation or two; or the Maya, where there was a protracted struggle between two main power blocs, neither of which could ever quite overcome the other. 110

In terms of the specific theory we've been developing here, where the three elementary forms of domination - control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power - can each crystallize into its own institutional form (sovereignty, administration and heroic politics), almost all these 'early states' could be more accurately described as 'second-order' regimes of domination. First-order regimes like the Olmec, Chavin or Natchez each developed only one part of the triad. But in the typically far more violent arrangements of second-order regimes, two of the three principles of domination were brought together in some spectacular, unprecedented way. Which two it was seems to have varied from case to case. Egypt's early rulers combined sovereignty and administration; Mesopotamian kings mixed administration and heroic politics; Classic Maya ajaws fused heroic politics with sovereignty.

We should emphasize that it's not as if any of these principles, in their elementary forms, were entirely absent in any one case: in fact, what seems to have happened is that two of them crystallized into institutional forms - fusing in such a way as to reinforce one another as the basis of government - while the third form of domination was largely pushed out of the realm of human affairs altogether and displaced on to the non-human cosmos (as with divine sovereignty in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, or the cosmic bureaucracy of the ClasSic Maya). Keeping all this in mind, let's return briefly to Egypt to clarify some remaining points.

It's simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, 'chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to'; or as Jared Diamond says, 'large populations can't function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.' In other words, ifvou want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing sys-tems, in turn, are almost invariably assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process. Now, as we've already seen, none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong. We saw one dramatic example in Chapter Eight. It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to coordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there's little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters. Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite 'egalitarian', were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn't care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.

We've also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavín de Huántar would be one such exam-Ple). In fact, the first forms of functional administration, in the sense of keeping archives of lists, ledgers, accounting procedures, overseers, audits and files, seem to emerge in precisely these kinds of ritual

In some ways, people living in smal scale communities began charf as if they were already living in mass societies of a certain kind, ten though nobody had ever seen a city. Ir sounds counterintuitive. But it is what we see in the intervening centuries in the evidence of Villages scattered across a large region, from southwestern Ian through much of Irag and all the way over to the Turkish highlands, In many ways this phenomenon was another version of the kind of 'culture areas or hospitality zones that we discussed in earlier chap-ters, but there was a different element: affinities between distant households and families seem to have been increasingly based on a principle of cultural uniformity. In a sense, then, this was the first era of the 'global village'.122

What it all looks like, in the archaeological record, is impossible to miss. We write from first-hand experience here, since one of us has conducted archaeological investigations of prehistoric villages in Iragi Kurdistan, dating before and after the great transformation took place. What you find, in the fifth millennium Bc, is the gradual disappearance from village life of most outward signs of difference or individuality, as administrative tools and other new media technologies spread across a large swathe of the Middle East. Households were now built to increasingly standard tripartite plans, and pottery, which had once been a way of expressing individual skill and creativ-ity, now seems to have been made deliberately drab, uniform and in some cases almost standardized. Craft production in general became more mechanical, and female labour was subiect to new forms of spatial control and segregation. 123 In fact this entire period, lasting around 1,000 years (archaeologists call it the Ubaid, after the site of Tell al-Ubaid in southern Iraq), was one of innovation in metallurgy, horticulture, textiles, diet and lons distance trade; but from a social vantage point, everything seems to have been done to prevent such innovations becoming markers of rank or individual distinction - in other words, to prevent the ener Bence of obrious differences in status, both within and berwea villages. Intriguingly, it is possible tharwe both vnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world's first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening. 14

To get a sense of how such small-scale bureaucracies might have worked in practice we can briefly consider again the ayllu, those Andean village associations which, as we mentioned earlier, had their own home-grown administration.

Avllu too were based on a strong principle of equality; their members literally wore uniforms, with each valley having its own traditional design of cloth. One of the ayllu's main functions was to redistribute agricultural land as families grew larger or smaller, to ensure none grew richer than any other - indeed, to be a 'rich' household meant, in practice, to have a large number of unmarried children, hence much land, since there was no other basis for comparing wealth. 12s Ayllu also helped families avoid seasonal labour crunches and kept track of the number of able-bodied young men and women in each household, so as to ensure not only that none were short-handed at critical moments, but also that the aged or infirm, widows, orphans or disabled were taken care of.

Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the village bureaucracy' comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable arguments that crop up in such situations - about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom. 126 Each ayllu appears to have had its own khipu strings, which were constantly knotted and re-knotted to keep track as debts were registered or cancelled out. It's possible that khip were invented for such purposes. In other words, although the actual administrative tools used were different, the reason for their existence was quite similar to what we envisage for the Village accounting systems in prehistoric Mesopotamia, and rooted in a similarly explicit ideal of equality.127

Of course, the danger of such accounting procedures is that they Can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangement, even those founded on arbitrary violence (e.g. 'con-quest'), an air of even-handedness and equity. That is why sovereignty and administration make such a potentially lethal combination, taking the equalizing effects of the latter and transforming them into tools of social domination, even tyranny.

Under the Inca, let's recall, all ayllus were reduced to the status of'conquered women' and khipu strings were employed to keep track of labour debts owed to the central Inca administration. Unlike the local string records, these were fixed and non-negotiable; the knots were never unravelled and retied. Here it is necessary to overcome a few myths about the Inca, who are often portrayed as the mildest of empires - even a kind of benevolent proto-socialist state. In fact, it was the pre-existing ayllu system that continued to provide social security under Inca rule. By contrast, the overarching administrative structure put in place by the Inca court was largely extractive and exploitative in nature (even if local officers of the court preferred to misrepresent it as an extension of ayllu principles): for purposes of central monitoring and recording, households were grouped into units of 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and so on, each responsible for labour obligations over and above those they already owed to their community, in a way that could only play havoc with existing alle-giances, geography and communal organization. 128 Corvée duties were assigned uniformly according to a rigid scale of measurement; work tasks might simply be invented if there was nothing that needed doing; scofflaws faced severe punishment. 129

The results were predictable, and we can see them clearly reflected in the first-hand accounts supplied by Spanish chroniclers of the time, who took an obvious interest in Inca strategies of conquest and domination and their local workings. Community leaders became de facto state agents, and either took advantage of legalisms to get rich or tried to shield their wards and themselves if they got in to trouble. Those who were unable to meet labour debts or who tried unsuccessfully to flee or rebel, were reduced to the status of servants, retainers and concubines for Inca courts and officials. 130 This new class of hereditary peons was growing rapidly at the time of Spanish conquest.

None of which is to say the Inca reputation as adept administrators is unfounded. They apparently were capable of keeping exact track of withs and deaths, adjusting household numbers at yearly festivals and so on. Why, then, impose such an oddly clumsy and monolithic system on to an existing one (the ayllu) which was clearly more nuanced? It's hard to escape the impression that in all such situations, the apparent heavy-handedness, the insistence on following the rules even when they make no sense, is really half the point. Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every houschold, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity - but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves.

In the Middle East, very similar things appear to have happened in later periods of history. Most famously, perhaps, the books of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible preserve memories of powerful protests that ensued as demands for tribute drove farmers into penury, forced them to pawn their flocks and vineyards, and ultimately surrender their children into debt peonage. Or wealthy merchants and administrators took advantage of crop failures, floods, natural disasters or neigh-bours' simple bad luck to offer interest-bearing loans that led to the same results. Similar complaints are recorded in China and India as well. The first establishment of bureaucratic empires is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok. This is not the place to outline a history of money and debtl31 - only to note that it's no coincidence that societies like those of Uruk-period Mesopotamia were, simultaneously, commercial and bureaucratic.

Both money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence. What we wish to emphasize at this point is how frequently the most violent inequalities seem to arise, in the first instance, from such fictions of legal equality. All citizens of a city, or al worshippers of its god, or all subjects of its king were considered Ultimately the same - at least in that one specific way. The same laws, the same rights, the same responsibilities applied to all of them, Whether as individuals or, in later and more patriarchal times, as families under the aegis of some paterfamilias.

What's important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects unique situations. This is of course what gives the word 'bureaucracy' such distasteful associ ations almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity. But there's no reason to believe that impersonal systems were originally, or are necessarily, stupid. If the calculations of a Boliv. ian ayllu or Basque council - or presumably a Neolithic village administration like that of Tell Sabi Abyad, and its urban successors in Mesopotamia - produced an obviously impossible or unreasonable result, matters could always be adjusted. As anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair. It's the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, 'Rules are rules; I don't want to hear about it' that allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.

Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word 'free' ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning 'friend? - since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first. In fact, the earliest word for 'freedom' recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means 'return to mother' - because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors' households to return home to their kin. 132 One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we'd suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable - in a nutshell, bureaucratized. It is one of history's great ironies that Madame de Graffigny's notion of the Inca state as a model of a benevolent, bureaucratic order actually derives from a misreading of the sources, if a very common one: mistaking the social benefits of local, self-organized administrative units (ayllu) for an imperial, Inca structure of com-mand, which in reality served almost exclusively to provision the army, priesthood and administrative classes. 133

Mesopotamian and later Chinese kings also tended to represent themselves, like the Egyptian nomarchs, as protectors of the weak, feeders of the hungry, solace of widows and orphans.

As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence.