introduction

IntroductionAuthor(s): John W. AdamsSource: Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1987), pp. 67-71Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40316133 .

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INTRODUCTION

JOHN W. ADAMS

Right at the moment- almost literally- our received ideas about hunter- gatherer societies (HGS) are undergoing a major interlude of doubt and scepticism. What used to be re- garded as production modes which were evo- lutionarily prior to horticulture are now be- ginning to be reassessed as the results of encroachment and encapsulation by ways of life based on farming, pastoralism, or indus- trial production. Moreover, physical anthro- pologists are discussing the likelihood that there was a change to the modern human anatomical form in the late Pleistocene from a more robust, sexually dimorphous animal, whose social organization would have looked quite different had we been able to observe them as ethnographers (Foley 1986). Present- day "lower," "simple" hunter- gatherer societies, such as the !Kung, the Eskimo, and most of the Australian Aborigines, do not show us ancestral behavior.

This will be a radical "paradigm shift" if it becomes generally accepted, as I think it may, and with it the place of Northwest Coast (NWC) societies should undergo dra- matic revision. The purpose of my introduction is to place the papers which follow into this new paradigm, for they are important not merely for the classification which they bring to early relationships between Northwest Coast and Interior groups, but for the light they shed on the early forms of our own post- Pleistocene culture.

Northwest Coast tribes have long seemed anomalous in the sequence of cultural evolu- tion: how was it possible that such complex and sophisticated societies could maintain themselves by hunting and gathering? To help clarify their place in the scheme of things -or perhaps to sweep them into a corner- the term "higher hunters" was coined (Hobhouse et al. 1915), currently replaced by the term "complex hunters." But they are not isolated sports. The more complex Australian Abori- gines have many of the "advanced" features

of horticultural life, the Calusa of southwest Florida were a tributary chiefdom based on fishing (Marquardt 1986), and there are many striking parallels between the European Meso- lithic period (10,000 to 5000-3000 B.P.) and Northwest Coast societies. Both sets of the latter cultures were postglacial adaptations to a marine environment, in a northern climate, by sedentary foragers, with social stratification and heraldic art (Zvelebil 1986). Indeed, it may turn out to be not at all farfetched to look upon the Northwest Coast tribes as the eastern branch of an adaptation which was common with those of Europe.

Far from being anomalies, then, NWC societies have suddenly become spotlighted as possible examples of the earliest observable lifeways of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, for the shift to a physically new human being together with the probably rapid development of more complicated social forms effectively cut us off from prior forms and their associated lifeways. Complex HGS are coming to be seen as a parallel, simultaneous evolutionary development to the Neolithic. Indeed, when Captain Cook first saw the Nootka, he was gaz- ing, in effect, at something which was very much like his own forebears1 way of life. The "simple," "lower" HGS that we have ob- served may all turn out to have been recently pushed into increasingly marginal environments by farmers and pastoralists and devolved to their present forms (Denbow and Wilmsen 1986).

It has been a hallmark of these cultures, indeed the basis for suggesting that they are original, primitive forms of communism, that they share the products of their labor with each other. The men take turns providing food, that is of being exploited economically. "Complex" HGS do not. Food is plentiful, with no need to share except in times of occa- sional ecological stress, which, among North- west Coast peoples, becomes a means of political domination. There are, moreover, many cultural items which are not shared: myths,

John W. Adams, Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208

ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 67-71, 1987



68 Arctic Anthropology 24:1

poles, coppers, songs, dances, and crests. All of them differentiate one person from another and are created, intellectual products.

The interface of NWC cultures with the "simpler" peoples of the Interior surrounding them therefore raises questions about which came first, the "lower" or the "higher"?

STUDIES OF TRADE AND STRATIFICATION

The papers which follow were originally presented at a symposium entitled "Coastal- Interior Trade and Social Stratification in Northwestern North America," organized by Robert Grumet and Charles Bishop for the annual meetings of the American Anthropolo- gical Association, Chicago, 1983. I was the discussant. The papers by Joan Townsend and Robert Grumet are, unfortunately, miss- ing from this volume, due to unavoidable de- lays in completing them.

The finished papers use data from the time of earliest continuous contact between natives and whites to answer questions about which features of social organization were aboriginal and which were the result of such contact. An assumption common to all the papers is that simple precedes complex, with the underlying ambition to uncover how early the complexity might have existed and whether, in fact, it might not have been diffused first from the Europeans to the Northwest Coast peoples and from them to the Interior groups. Most of the authors have recently participated in other symposia, which have been published, where they presented parallel sets of ideas on similar themes. It seems ap- propriate, therefore, to consider some of these also, as well as to suggest what the two in- complete papers proposed.

Klein reminds us that the British once had interests in the fur trade of the Alaskan pan- handle, and that they did not seek to missionize the natives. So, while this interest was not accompanied by any deliberate attempt to change Tlingit culture, it undoubtedly af- forded the Tlingits a chance to become well acquainted with the Europeans1 ways prior to the 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States. At the time of British contact, the Tlingits had trade monopolies with the peoples of the Interior, and Klein describes the trading, feuding, chiefs, and other elements, as ob- served from the comparative safety of the traders' stockade.

In addition to confirming Coderefs (1950) observations about the Hudson's Bay Com- pany's reluctance to missionize among the Kwakiutl, one of the most valuable properties of Klein's paper is that it replicates, in part, both Grumet's (1983) and Bishop's (this volume) points about this "interregnum"

period, which was apparently common to much of the Coast.

Perhaps more controversial, however, is the paper by de Laguna, which suggests that witchcraft beliefs (technically defined, following Evans-Pritchard [1937] and Murdock [1980], as the doings of inherently evil people) were introduced to the Northwest Coast by the Rus- sians. Murdock (1980) linked such "pure" witchcraft beliefs to stratified societies. De Laguna (1983) previously suggested that the Tlingit aboriginally had only ranked statuses and sib chiefs, neither classes nor politically powerful regional chiefs, and that the latter had been created by the European colonizers who "saw" them everywhere.

De Laguna describes an interesting contrast between the Tlingit shaman, whose role was the protector of his "house" (even a war specialist), and the Atna shaman, whose role was primarily that of a curer. One of the functions of the Tlingit practitioner was to find out witches. But from her description of the witches, I am not convinced that they were people who were inherently evil in the sense that they might cause harm unconscious- ly, which was a part of Murdock' s formulation. The contrast between "witch" and "sorcerer" has been discarded by many recent writers on religion, and de Laguna alludes to this but basically maintains her position.

Unfortunately, Joan Townsend was unable to revise her symposium paper for this publication. She is a strong advocate for the view that not only the Tlingits but their Athapaskan neighbors of the Interior had ranking as early as the late prehistoric period (c. A.D. 1700- 1800). In other words, the Russian fur trade did not create ranking, though it surely inten- sified it (Townsend 1983b). Her paper was a natural extension of a previous publication in which she concluded that slavery preceded the arrival of the Russian fur traders, find- ing a reference to "slaves" in the Russian sources on Alaska as early as 1759 (Townsend 1983a: 127).

Finally, Bishop gives us a meaty paper, suggesting that social stratification of Interior peoples in postcontact times grew out of the conditions of trade with the Coast and that precontact development of stratification on the Coast may well have had a similar origin. Trade promoted ranking when chiefs could monopolize trading relations.

In 1983, Bishop (1983) suggested that the potlatch evolved from feasts given by return- ing traders to the kinsmen who had helped them assemble their stock of goods. Here, on the other hand, he investigates the possibly late diffusion of ranking to the Carrier of the Interior from the Tsimshian, and attributes it to a desire for partial control of trade by chiefs. Bishop presents a case



Adams: Introduction 69

that ranking was equated with inheritable opportunities for trade, and that these opportunities were confirmed at pot- latches.

So, both Bishop and Townsend have opted for the likelihood that ranking and "incipient stratification" (read: "developing class system") were aboriginal features of Tlingit and Tsimshian societies. The matter of such social forms among the Interior tribes is a question of the sources-as well as archaeological evidence, as Bishop points out-but would in any case be structurally attributable to the pres- ence nearby of the NVVC tribes, whose own systems of stratification seem to be present at least as early as first contact- with de Laguna (1983) writing the minority opinion. When and how the NWC societies became so stratified is the more fundamental question now. Could it- how could it- be endemic? What is the role of "diffusion" versus structural maturation?

BASIC ECO-POLITICAL PROBLEMS

There has been a widespread assumption that social stratification is simply incompatible with HGS because of their penchant for shar- ing. So, the research literature on NWC stratification has concentrated on the empiri- cal question of whether, in actual fact, it really existed or is some sort of mirage. What could possibly account for NWC stratification prior to the coming of Europeans? Unfortunately, political ideology has played a major role in this matter for at least 50 years.

What has been apparently overlooked is the fact that NWC tribes are sedentary; and it is almost a truism that one of the major political and economic problems of sedentary peoples is their vulnerability to being raided by more mobile groups. Until now, the extent of this threat has been thought to be confined to peoples who practiced plant cultivation.

That sedentary HGS were prey to raiding and trespassing is attested to by the fact that both processes figure prominently in their legendary history and law. George MacDonald (1984) pointed to the Gitksan legends of the warrior Nekt, which he dates about 1750, as evidence that such a condition existed. These legends refer to a wish to monopolize iron, then being introduced by the Europeans. Ferguson (1984) goes so far as to attribute the origins of the potlatch to the developing ritualization of appeasement of potentially threatening neighbors, or a form of "protection racket." Extrapolating from their arguments, I have suggested (Adams 1986) that the legends of Nekt and of Legaix, the famous Tsimshian chiefly status, recount

the exploits of two hereditary chiefs whose wealth was based not on primary production but on raiding and trading and sometimes both.

Trading and raiding, then, like pastoralism, are secondary ecological niches furnished by the fact that sedentary peoples stored con- siderable amounts of food each year. Such conditions existed aboriginally in both the Southwestern U.S. and the Southeastern U.S. where storage and stratification coexisted (Peebles and Kus 1977). MacDonald dates a Northwest Coast "war complex" as early as 3000 B.P., while Ferguson (1983) concludes that warfare was endemic to the Coast. It would have been a simple matter to extend this complex of schrectlichkeit to peoples of the Interior in response to the fur trade, and, in doing so, to reinforce their lower status in the regional system.

Ferguson (1983) also suggests that warfare and potlatching coexisted, a conclusion also reached by Grumet in his unfinished paper from this symposium. In other words, war was not the game Codere (1950) imagined it to be nor was it turned into potlatching. Part of the evidence for this conclusion is that violence, either as feud or warfare, might break out at feasts (or trade fairs). And there are many stories of treacherous hosts. Trading took place outside the potlatch, often at local fairs, and it might erupt into armed skirmishes.

In other words, once a society becomes largely sedentary and extensive use of storage technology develops, opportunities arise for exploiting the situation. Hence, there even- tually is a need for recognizing legitimate status. Warfare and raiding created a basic problem of how best to defend one's territory and with it the problem of legitimate succes- sion. Potlatching, then, including the crest system, coexisted with warfare and trading but was neither. It was merely one of the processes- albeit perhaps the primary one- for creating legitimacy (i.e. , chief ships) with- in the local sphere. But others would have included valid shamanic experience, "crest revelations," brute force, and sheer luck.

The central ritual act in NWC legal processes is oath-taking, just as in our Common Law system it is often said to be the adversarial procedure which pits two attorneys against each other as champions for the plaintiff and defendant. Oathtaking consists of the person attesting the truth by placing himself in contact with an object (such as a crest de- sign) which has supernatural power, just as a witness in our court places his right hand on the Bible and swears to tell the truth. The NWC chiefs' speakers used to hold "speakers' staffs" which were carved with the chiefs' crests in whose names they spoke. A similar



70 Arctic Anthropology 24:1

custom is also found as late as the eighteenth century in parts of Germany (Roeber 1986). In all three systems, mis- stating about sacred things was assumed to engender negative supernatural sanctions.

The use of crests created a common con- stitutional framework among the participants in potlatching because the crest system is shared, even though the individual crests are not. It is, in effect, a language which had/ has its own notational system in the well- known totem poles (Adams 1986). Knowledge of the system is an important chiefly preroga- tive which confers the ability to hold and talk about the powers represented by the crests. Laymen would become ill should they do so. As the people of Kitwancool told Duff (1959), a chief1 s power is in his pole.

The whole issue of slavery, citizenship, and ethnicity seems to revolve around questions of trespass, because slaves are defined as coming from another culture. Even the simple eating of one's father!s food is talked about as if it were a "theft," and trespass is more serious than murder (Adams 1981).

Having crests, which are associated with land, therefore sanctifies a chief1 s claims. They are described in the sacred stories (adawaq in Tsimshian) in which human beings and supernaturals interact. Stories about "war" and "trouble" (Duff 1959; Barbeau 1929), on the other hand, are called mahlhlasxw and lack the sanctifying supernatural experiences, a lack shared by the story of the warrior Nekt. In other words, when the dispute is finally settled, mahlhlasxw is changed to adawaq by the addition of the legitimizing supernatural incidents. History, as we know it, is therefore "unfinished busi- ness" concerned with raiding, feuding, and trespassing.

A CONCLUDING THOUGHT

The late Philip Drucker (1983) recently argued that NWC societies had no super- ordinate political organization above the level of the "local group" by which he meant "house" or numaym. Tollefson (1987), on the other hand, now suggests that the Indians of Puget Sound, at least in the 1840s, had a complex system of chiefs, subchiefs, and coun- cils designed to coordinate military defense against neighbors, with clear geographical divisions to the apparatus. These two diver- gent views bear witness to the rapidity with which our perspectives about NWC social complexity have changed, much of the change coming in the last year or two, that is, since the papers of the 1983 symposium were first presented. The next symposium may have to take for its starting point the question:

why were not the peoples of the Interior more complex?

REFERENCES

Adams, John W. 1981 Recent Ethnology of the Northwest

Coast. Annual Review of Anthro- pology 10:361-392.

1986 Gitksan Totem Poles: Notes on a Complex, Paleolithic Notation System. Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, London, England.

Barbeau, Marius 1929 The Downfall of Temlaham. Macmillan

Publishing Co. , Toronto.

Bishop, Charles A. 1983 Limiting Access to Limited Goods:

The Origins of Stratification in In- terior British Columbia. In: The Development of Political Organization in Native North America, edited by Elisabeth Tooker, pp. 148-161. 1979 Proceedings of the American Ethno- logical Society.

Codere, Helen 1950 Fighting with Property. University

of Washington Press, Seattle.

de Laguna, Frederica 1983 Aboriginal Tlingit Sociopolitical Or-

ganization. In: The Development of Political Organization in Native North America, edited by Elisabeth Tooker, pp. 71-85. 1979 Proceed- ings of the American Ethnological Society.

Denbow, James R. and Edwin N. Wilmsen 1986 Advent and Course of Pastoralism

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on the Northwest Coast of America. In: The Development of Political Organization in Native North America, edited by Elisabeth Tooker, pp. 86- 96. 1979 Proceedings of the Ameri- can Ethnological Society.

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of the Kitwancool. Anthropology in B.C. Memoir No. 4. British



Adams: Introduction 71

Columbia Provincial Museum, Victoria.

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Among the Azande. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Ferguson, Brian 1983 Warfare and Redistributive Exchange

on the Northwest Coast. In: The Development of Political Organization in Native North America, edited by Elisabeth Tooker, pp. 133-147. 1979 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society.

1984 A Re-Examination of the Causes of Northwest Coast Warfare. In: Warfare, Culture and Environment, edited by Brian Ferguson, pp. 267- 328. Academic Press, Orlando.

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Perspectives on Hominids, Humans and Hunter -Gatherers. Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gather- ing Societies, London, England.

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Social Stratification Among the Coast Tsimshian. Paper presented at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago.

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1915 The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples. Chapman and Hall, London.

MacDonald, George 1984 The Epic of Nekt. In: The Tsim-

shian: Images of the Past, Views of the Present, edited by Margaret Seguin, pp. 65-81. university of British Columbia Press, Vancouver.

Marquardt, William 1986 Calusa of Florida: Hierarchical/

Tributary Hunter-Gatherer-Fisher. Paper presented at the Fourth In- ternational Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, London, England .

Murdock, George Peter 1980 Theories of Illness: A World Survey.

University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.

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Ranked Societies. American Antiquity 42(3): 421-448.

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of Inheritance in Village Transac- tions. Paper presented at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, St. Louis.

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and Slavery in Aleut Societies. In: The Development of Political Organiza- tion in Native North America, edited by Elisabeth Tooker, pp. 120-132. 1979 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society.

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Zvelebil, Marek 1986 Postglacial Foraging in the Forests of

Europe. Scientific American 254(5): 104-115.



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