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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 2, April 2002� 2002 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2002/4302-0002$3.50

The Vines ofComplexity

Egalitarian Structures and theInstitutionalization ofInequality among the Enga1

by Polly Wiessner

The initial stages of the institutionalization of hierarchical socialinequalities remain poorly understood. Recent models haveadded important perspectives to “adaptationist” approaches bycentering on the agency of “aggrandizers” who alter egalitarianinstitutions to suit their own ends through debt, coercion, ormarginalization. However, such approaches often fail to take therecursive interaction between agents and egalitarian structure se-riously, regarding egalitarian structures as the products of sim-plicity or blank slates on which aggrandizers can make theirmarks. The approach here, drawing on insights from the work ofDouglass North, views egalitarian structures as complex institu-tions which, together with their accompanying ideologies, havearisen to reduce the transaction costs of exchange in small-scalesocieties. It will be argued that egalitarian structures and the co-alitions that maintain them vary as greatly in configuration,scope, and nature as do hierarchical structures of power, present-ing a variety of obstacles on the path to institutionalized in-equality. Data from the precolonial historical traditions of 110Enga tribes, covering a time span of some 250 years in whichvast exchange networks developed and hierarchical inequalitiesbegan to be institutionalized, will be used to examine (1) the na-ture of egalitarian structures and coalitions in Enga at the outset,(2) how these steered the perceptions, motivations, and strategiesof agents, and (3) the outcomes of different courses of action. Byexploring egalitarian structures in this way it should be possibleto depart from neoevolutionary models of political “evolution”without abandoning a more encompassing theoretical framework.

p o l l y w i e s s n e r is Professor of Anthropology at the Univer-sity of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-0060, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1947, she was educated at SarahLawrence College (B.A., 1969) and the University of Michigan(Ph.D., 1977). She was a research associate of the Institute forHuman Ethology in the Max Planck Society from 1981 to 1996and has done fieldwork among the !Kung San (Ju/’hoansi) andamong the Enga of Papua New Guinea. Her publications include(with A. Tumu) Historical Vines: Enga Networks of Exchange,Ritual, and Warfare in Papua New Guinea (Washington, D.C.:Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998) and (with Wulf Schiefen-hovel) the edited volume Food and the Status Quest (Oxford:Berghahn Books, 1996) and a number of articles on reciprocity,exchange, and style in artifacts among the !Kung San. The pre-sent paper was accepted 17 viii 01.

1. I thank Akii Tumu and Nitze Pupu for their collaboration overmore than a decade. Funding for this project was provided by theForschungsstelle fur Humanethologie in the Max Planck Societyand the Enga Provincial Government. Special thanks go to the hun-

Perhaps the dimmest areas that remain in studies of po-litical “evolution” are the initial stages in which ine-qualities beyond those of age, ability, and genderemerged, grew, and became institutionalized. Engen-dered in a climate in which social and material discretionwas the rule, the onset and dynamics of the institution-alized inequality remain concealed by sparse archaeo-logical evidence. What is apparent, however, is that theprocess was often protracted and punctuated by boomsand crashes (Bender 1990, Drennan 1991, Earle 1997,Kirch 1991, Paynter 1989). The emergence of institu-tionalized inequality is considered to be a threshold inpolitical evolution when deeply rooted orientations ofsmall-scale societies were overcome, paving the way forthe development of complex polities (Earle 1997, Fein-man 1995, Flannery 1972, Hayden 1995, Roscoe 1993,Upham 1990). When seen in the longer-term perspectiveof human evolution, however, inequality is more accu-rately portrayed as “reemerging.” Hierarchy character-izes societies of our closest nonhuman primate ancestors(Knauft 1991, Kummer 1971) and seems to be deeplyrooted in human behavior (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1974, 1989;Salter 1995; Tiger and Fox 1971).2 Therefore it is likelythat societies in which individuals held equal rights toresources and status first developed in the Lower or Mid-dle Paleolithic. Explanations for the origin of egalitari-anism are still highly hypothetical (Boehm 1999a, Haw-kes 2000, Knauft 1991). However, egalitarianism appearsto have provided the context for the evolution of moreelaborate forms of cooperation, including networks ofmutual support based on kinship that extended far out-side the local group (Ambrose 1998, Gamble 1998,McBrearty and Brooks 2000, Wiessner 1998). New levelsof cooperation fostered by egalitarian relations providedpowerful tools for the enterprising to work with, on theone hand, and rigid constraints governing competition,on the other.

Several approaches have been employed to address thereemergence of inequality and its subsequent institu-tionalization into systems with hierarchical organiza-tion, hereditary position, and control by the elite overinstitutions that extend beyond the boundaries of thelocal group (Brumfiel 1994, Earle 1987, Hayden 1995,Paynter 1989, Roscoe 1993). Arnold (1993:80) has dividedthese approaches into two groups according to whetheror not individuals are portrayed as active agents of po-litical change. The first, called adaptationist or mana-gerial models (Brumfiel and Earle 1987), contend thatchange is spurred by conditions that affect the wholecultural system. These may come either from without,for example, population pressure, resource stress,drought, or warfare (Carneiro 1970, Cohen 1985, Johnsonand Earle 1987, Keeley 1988, Webster 1975, Wittfogel1957, Wright and Johnson 1975), or from within, for ex-

dreds of Enga who gave us their time and their knowledge. I amalso grateful to CA referees and John Clark, who provided sub-stantive criticism on earlier drafts of this paper.2. Insightful in this context is Clastres’s (1977:34) remark that “cul-ture apprehends power as the very resurgence of nature.”

234 F current anthropology Volume 43, Number 2, April 2002

ample, the need for redistribution of resources within orbetween societies (Fried 1960, 1967; Halstead and O’Shea1982; Isbell 1978; Polanyi 1944; Rathje 1972; Sahlins1958; Service 1958). Inequalities arise out of the corre-sponding need for “managers” to solve such problems.The degree of functionalism in adaptationist models andthe motivations attributed to managers vary considera-bly. Perhaps their strongest point for the emergence ofhierarchical inequality is that the seeds of inequality cantake root only when the population stands to gain realbenefits from stronger leadership. They suffer, however,from an inability to account for internally generatedchange, human agency (Brumfiel 1992, Cowgill 1975),and the impact of preexisting cultural orientations.Moreover, empirical evidence from numerous studies in-dicates that inequality first appears under conditions ofresource abundance, not stress (Hayden 1995, Price andBrown 1985, Price and Feinman 1995, Paynter 1989). Re-distribution by elites does little to manage resources ofa region in such a way as to benefit a wide segment ofthe population (Earle 1977, Hayden and Gargett 1990,Peebles and Kus 1977).

In response, the focus has shifted to explanationswhich center on human agency—the vying of “aggran-dizers” for prestige and wealth. Demographic and envi-ronmental factors take second place as facilitating orconstraining the designs of actors. Agency approachesare founded on the premise that every society has am-bitious individuals who provide a motor for change. Por-trayals of the strategies chosen by aggrandizers and theirintentionality differ. Hayden (1995), Boone (1992), Earle(1997), Arnold (1993, 1995), and others, drawing on cul-tural ecology, evolutionary ecology, and Marxism, re-spectively, propose that aggrandizers strive to gain con-trol of strategic resources or manipulate the productionof others through debt and contract, coercion, margin-alization, or exploitation made possible by restrictedmobility. Though power comes from several sources,primacy rests in material processes (Earle 1997:12). Ma-terialist stances depict aggrandizers as individuals who,through the alchemy of ambition, are able to man-ipulate others to achieve a standard outcome—pre-ferential access to resources and the domination of oth-ers. Quantitative economic gains are applied to bringabout alterations in the social order, which are then le-gitimized through ideology. Clark and Blake (1994:17),drawing on practice theory (Bourdieu 1977, Giddens1979, Ortner 1984), see the situation somewhat differ-ently and add important considerations to agency ap-proaches. They argue that institutionalized inequality isthe unintended outcome of self-interested competitionamong political actors vying for prestige by employingtactics that conform to the self-interests of their follow-ers. Competition over physical resources is not an endin itself, though controls of land, labor, and resourcesmay occur in the course of its pursuit. Agency ap-proaches raise important questions: Under what condi-tions do people in an egalitarian society allow others totake control? Are they pleased or squeezed to do so? Doesprimacy really rest in material processes?

Despite their substantial contributions, agency ap-proaches have seldom investigated the recursive inter-action between structure and agency, in part becausethey consider egalitarianism not as structure but as a“slate of simplicity” on which aggrandizers can leavetheir mark. By “structure” I mean institutions—the hu-manly and historically devised rules of the game (North1990)—and ideology, “values and beliefs that determinepeople’s goals and theories of how the world works” (Ens-minger 1992:168). The omission of structure from theequation has obscured fundamental dynamics. For ex-ample, adaptationist models see context-dependency asthe mother of new cultural structures, the impact of theold presumably disintegrating under demographic orecological pressures. The approaches of Arnold (1993),Hayden (1995), and Boone (1992) do not seriously ques-tion whether it is possible or desirable to indebt or mar-ginalize when kinship and egalitarian ethics reign anddependence on egalitarian institutions is high. And, onceaggrandizers get a foot in the door, can they secure in-cremental gains, or does “the structure strike back” aspeople employ sanctions to topple them and defeat hi-erarchy (Mitchell 1988)? Or, as Clastres (1977:32) hasproposed, if the structure of egalitarian societies lies inthe exchange of women, goods, and words, then thepower, as “the rejection of reciprocity,” is essentially“the rejection of society itself” and meets with strongresistance. Clark and Blake’s (1994) model is sensitiveto structure, but in being so it tends to collapse structureinto the ends and interests of the actors and their fol-lowers, making it difficult to grasp the tension betweenagency and structure. Without such tension there is nomotion, and the failures in social reproduction that causethe booms and crashes seen in the archaeological recordare obscured.

Here I will use ethnohistorical data from the Enga ofhighland Papua New Guinea to explore the interactionbetween structure and agency at the point in their po-litical evolution when hierarchical inequalities emergedand began to be institutionalized. The data come fromthe historical traditions of 110 tribes recording events ofsignificance starting some 250–400 years ago, shortly be-fore sweet potato vines were introduced to Enga, andcontinuing well beyond first contact with Europeans inthe 1930s (Wiessner and Tumu 1998). The sweet potatoreleased constraints on production, allowed a substantialsurplus to be produced in pigs, and permitted rapid dem-ographic and economic growth (Watson 1965a, b, 1977).During the period considered, inequalities grew signifi-cantly as vast exchange networks were constructed un-der the initiatives of enterprising men. The greatest ofthese, the Tee cycle, involved some 40,000 participantsby the time of first contact. Enga historical traditionsdetail the personalities of some of the Tee cycle managersinvolved and their dreams, strategies, victories, and fail-ures as they jockeyed to construct and master these net-works in the pursuit of “name,” fame, and wealth.

The thrust of my argument will be that egalitarianismis not the product of organizational simplicity or “tra-ditionalism,” not the tabula rasa for human affairs

wiessner The Vines of Complexity F 235

(Boehm 1999a, Trigger 1990) on which aggrandizers im-press their designs. Rather, egalitarianism is the outcomeof complex institutions and ideologies created and main-tained by cultural means which empower a coalition ofthe weaker to curb the strong (see also Cashdan 1980,Clastres 1977, Kelly 1993).3 Egalitarian coalitions varyas greatly in configuration, composition, scope, and na-ture as hierarchical power structures, producing a widevariety of paths to and outcomes of the institutionali-zation of inequality in different societies.

Agents and Egalitarian Institutions

As a point of departure for understanding institutions, Iwill draw on some insights from the work of DouglassNorth (1990, n.d.). Institutions, following North (1990:3), are “the rules of the game in a society or, more for-mally, the humanly devised constraints that shape hu-man interaction.” Exchange, whether social, economic,or political, is costly because of the many uncertaintiesof human interaction; institutions exist to reduce theuncertainties that generate transaction costs. In doing sothey facilitate cooperation and trust. Transaction costsare threefold: assessing value, protecting rights, and en-forcing agreements. Institutions, as the rules of the game,contribute to setting the incentive structure of a societyby determining opportunities that are open to individ-uals and influencing evaluations of costs and benefits.They vary widely in their efficiency and consequencesfor economic performance. Institutions structure trans-action costs and, together with technology, the feasibil-ity of engaging in economic activity. What may appearas advantageous exchange may not pay off if transactioncosts are too high. Because past, present, and future areconnected by the continuity of a society’s institutions,history matters—today’s and tomorrow’s decisions areshaped by institutions of the past (1990:vii).

North (1990) proposes that in traditional societiestransaction costs are low because of repeated interactionand relatively complete information (see also Ensminger1992:25), but I disagree.4 In nonmarket economies inwhich kin-based exchange systems play an importantrole in reducing risk Wiessner (1982, 1996), the goal ofexchange is to be covered during times of need. In thiscontext the social and the economic are closely inter-twined (Mauss 1925), and it is undesirable for returns tobe stipulated as to time, quantity, or quality (Sahlins1972). The most valuable information in such exchangesis the details of the partner—what he or she has to offerand will offer over the long run. This information is verycostly to obtain. Moreover, protection is tricky whentransgressors are close kin and enforcement difficultwhen people “vote with their feet” to avoid conflict. In

3. Some linguistic studies suggest that egalitarian societies mayhave characteristic strategies of verbal interaction (Sugawara 1997).4. See also Cashdan (1990), Kosse (1990), Flannery (1972), and John-son (1982) for discussions of the complexities of information flowin simple societies.

response to high transaction costs, many small-scale so-cieties provide a set of egalitarian institutions which fos-ter trust and make interactions more predictable.

Egalitarian institutions and ideologies do much to re-duce transactions costs in exchange. First, they stan-dardize important information about biological and fic-tive kin by stipulating that kin hold equal rights toresources and status. These rights are not compromisedif one party is unable to reciprocate over long periods;inability to reciprocate does not incur debt. Second, thecosts of “kinship dues” are lowered and trust is fosteredin egalitarian settings because assistance received cannotbe used to build position and exploit. Those who prosperfrom the help of others must similarly assist them, lim-iting competition that disrupts cooperative social rela-tionships. Third, equality facilitates the mobility that isso necessary to maintain broad networks of mutual as-sistance—people move between groups more easilywhen dominance and exploitation are not issues (Wiess-ner 1996:186–87). Egalitarian institutions are effectivefor reducing transaction costs, but they are not maxi-mally efficient. They constrain competition and empha-size redistributive activities, curtailing individual incen-tive and accumulation of material capital.

Egalitarian norms and relations must be constantlyenforced against aggrandizers and free riders. However,because breaches threaten all coalition members, en-forcement is shared, lowering its costs for individuals(Boehm 1993, 1999a; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1982; Sober and Wil-son 1998). The initial response to transgressions may beleveling during everyday talk (Wiessner 1981), the spiceof life in egalitarian societies, which brings “big shots”and slackers into line without threatening dyadic rela-tionships. If milder sanctions go unheeded, criticismmay escalate to such measures as witchcraft or ostra-cism, with the offender departing either permanently oruntil feelings cool. Not all efforts to excel are judged asthreatening—if individual achievements benefit others(for example, mediation, hunting, sharing, or defense) thedoer may elicit respect for efforts to excel, for example,priority in having his or her opinion heard, praise ratherthan criticism for marrying more than one spouse, ormore tolerance for bending the obligations of kinship.

If equality is the product of social institutions, thenone can never expect that egalitarianism will be com-plete or all-encompassing. Still, it is possible to formu-late a definition of egalitarian societies that is mean-ingful for social analysis. I will consider as egalitariansocieties that maintain equal access of individuals,within age-sex categories, to resources and status posi-tions or, following Fried’s (1960) classic definition, so-cieties in which there are as many positions of prestigein any age-sex grade as there are persons capable of fillingthem. Of the many societies that fit this definition of“egalitarian,” none is strictly undifferentiated (Flanagan1989). Most institute internal divisions on the basis ofage, sex, kinship, or ability in order to apportion tasksand promote complementarity within families or groups.What is difference and what is inequality may be difficultto distinguish. Moreover, the structure of coalitions that


Fig. 1. Location of the Enga and their neighbors onthe main island of Papua New Guinea.

enforce equality and cultural definitions of what con-stitutes transgression vary considerably and generate dif-ferent social realities. A minority of “egalitarian socie-ties,” usually marginalized hunter-gatherers in high-riskenvironments, achieve high degrees of equality owing tostrong mutual dependencies and lack of surplus to dis-tribute to others, amongst other things (Lee 1993, Mitch-ell 1988, Tanaka 1991, Wiessner 1996, Woodburn 1982).These are often taken as the baseline in models for theemergence of inequality on the dubious assumption thatcurrent hunter-gatherer populations provide the bestmodels for Paleolithic societies (Wilmsen 1989, Wobst1978). Given that most humans, past and present, in-habited richer environments, societies tolerating somecompetition (Lederman 1986:4, McDowell 1990) andmoderate inequalities based on achievement probablyconstitute more appropriate starting points. Such in-equalities may be based on wealth, ritual knowledge (Go-delier 1978, Harrison 1985), or cosmologically basedmoral evaluations such as witchcraft (Kelly 1993, Knauft1987).

Institutional Change

North (1990) argues that the players (entrepreneurs) andtheir collaborators (organizations) bring about institu-tional change intentionally or unintentionally in thecourse of the pursuit of wealth, income, or other objec-tives. Competition provides the motor for change,though the path is by no means a straight one. Individualpursuits require the deciphering of a complex environ-ment with ideologies. Because information is incom-plete, models are subjective, incentives are incompatible,and feedback is imperfect, actors’ choices are often not“rational” and may have unintended consequences.Change is path-dependent because it takes place withinthe existing institutional matrix and is governed by theknowledge and ideology of the agents; it has its ownhistory. Transaction costs have everything to do withhampering or facilitating change.

The above considerations all contribute to what mightbe called the “egalitarian bind.” The path on which theemergence of inequality begins is one in which compe-tition is dampened and enterprising individuals are notin a position of power to bring new ideas into regularpractice. The ethos of egalitarian societies and their ac-tors centers on redistribution and measured generosity,discouraging accumulation of economic capital. More-over, pursuing inequality threatens the very egalitarianstructures that reduce transaction costs for both the actorand potential followers, drawing social disapproval. Con-sequently, the attempts of agents to bring about incre-mental change by deploying gains made from short-termenterprises often dead-end in “little big men” or localdespots (Feil 1987, Watson 1971), both with relativelyshort careers.

To explore how egalitarian structures and coalitionssteered the motivations and strategies of actors and im-

pacted the insitutionalization of inequality in Enga, Iwill focus on four questions:

1. To what extent could maximizing strategies ofagents within existing institutions produce incrementalchanges in structure that gave them preferential accessto resources and allowed them to dominate others? Howdid egalitarian structures and coalitions hinder or facil-itate their efforts?

2. What role did the construction of new institutionsto take advantage of new social and economic opportu-nities with reduced transaction costs play in the emer-gence of institutionalized inequality? Who constructedthese, how, and what selection pressures led to theiracceptance?

3. How was ideology involved in altering existing in-stitutions and ushering in new ones?

4. What was the upshot of juxtaposing old institutionsand ideologies with new ones?

The Enga and Their Historical Traditions

The Enga are a highland horticultural population of ap-proximately 220,000, most of whom live at altitudes of1,500–2,500 m (fig. 1). They are well known in the an-thropological literature through the works of Feil (1984),Lacey (1975, 1979, 1980), Meggitt (1956, 1972, 1974,1977), Talyaga (1982), Waddell (1972), and Wohlt (1978),amongst many others. Their staple crop, sweet potato,is cultivated in an intensive system of mulch moundingto feed large human and pig populations. The Enga pop-ulation is divided into a segmentary lineage system ofphratries or tribes composed of some 1,000 to 6,000members and their constituent exogamous clans, sub-


table 1Chronological Scheme of Events Discussed in Text

Generations b.p. Event

ca. 9–12 Introduction of sweet potato to Engaand beginning of Enga historicaltraditions (ca. 250–400 b.p.)

8 Population shift from high altitudes tolower valleys

Beginning of early Tee cycle7 Kepele cult first practiced by horticul-

turists of western EngaSangai bachelors’ cult instituted and

spread westwardAmbum wars

6 Beginning of Great Ceremonial Wars5 (ca. 1855–85?) Kepele cult, called Aeatee, imported

into central EngaWar reparations initiated for

peacemaking4 (ca. 1885–1915) Tee cycle expanded to finance Great

WarsAeatee cult developed to coordinate

Tee cycle and Great WarsFemale-spirit cult imported into east-

ern EngaBachelors’ cults begin eastward spread

3 (ca. 1915–45) Tee cycle begins to subsume GreatWars

Aeatee/Kepele cult used to organizethe Tee

Female courtship added to bachelors’cults

First contact with Europeans (1934)Last Great War fought (1938–41)Tee cycle subsumes Great War

exchange routesAin’s cult 1941–42

2 (ca. 1945–75) Tee cycle continues to expand1 (ca. 1975–2005) 1975 Papua New Guinea’s

Independence

note: We have calculated a generation to be 30 years, thoughcertainly for the earliest generations time distortions are likelyto occur. In view of this, events that occurred in the second tofourth generation before the present were roughly dated in rela-tion to known occurrences; from the fifth to eight generation be-fore the present they were sequenced by genealogy but no at-tempts were made at dating. Prior to the eighth generation, theycan be neither dated nor sequenced. It is reassuring that trendssuch as the spread of the Tee cycle or major cults do show tem-poral consistency within and between areas.

clans, and lineages.5 The politics of land, social net-works, and exchange occupy much of men’s time andeffort, while women devote themselves primarily to fam-ily, gardening, and pig husbandry. Nine mutually intel-ligible dialect groups have been identified within theEnga population (Brennan 1982). Despite variationamong these, all Enga share a language and importanteconomic, social, political, and religious orientations.

The Enga historical traditions (atome pii) on whichthis paper is based are straightforward oral narratives thathave been passed down in men’s houses and during pub-lic events for generations, transmitting informationabout past events. They are said to have originated ineyewitness accounts and are held distinct from myth(tindii pii). Historical traditions contain information onsubsistence, wars, migrations, agriculture, the develop-ment of cults and ceremonial exchange networks, lead-ership, trade, environmental disasters, and fashions insong and dress. They cover a period that begins just priorto the introduction of the sweet potato (250–400 yearsago) and continues until the present. Accompanying ge-nealogies allow events to be placed in a general chron-ological framework (table 1).

Between 1985 and 1995, Akii Tumu, Nitze Pupu, andI collected and analyzed the historical traditions of 110tribes (phratries) of Enga.6 Testimonies were heard frompowerful and ordinary men alike to uncover the distri-bution of knowledge and differential interpretation ofmeaning by men from different segments of the popu-lation. We maintained dialogues with the most knowl-edgeable for evaluation of our ideas as the evidence ac-cumulated. Testimonies were painstakingly analyzedwith the help of the pioneering research of the oral his-torian Roderic Lacey (1975, 1979, 1980) to work out thestrengths and weaknesses of the Enga oral record as his-tory. More detailed evidence for most of the topics dis-cussed can be found in Wiessner and Tumu (1998). [Fora more detailed discussion of the research methodology,see the appendix that appears in the electronic editionof this issue on the journal’s web page.]

Equality at the Starting Point

Around the time of the introduction of the sweet potato,a sparse population of some 10,000 to 20,000 people in-habited the major valleys of Enga.7 In eastern Enga(1,500–1,900 m above sea level), sedentary horticultur-alists cultivated taro, yams, and other crops on the flat

5. As discussed elsewhere (Wiessner and Tumu 1998), I use “tribe,”a less precise notion than “phratry,” because it is a term familiarto the Enga themselves.6. Akii Tumu, the director of the Enga Cultural Centre, workedwith me during every phase of the project, as well as carrying outessential interviews between periods of joint fieldwork. Nitze Papu,an Enga lawyer, collected superb family histories from his own clanand did much of the translation work for the project. Without theirpolitical acuity and knowledge of Enga culture and history, theproject would not have been possible.7. This is a rough estimate made on the basis of genealogical in-formation (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:appendix 2).

terraces, reserving the mid-slopes for pig forage and thehigh forest for hunting and gathering. For areas of centralEnga (1,900–2,100 m) roughly equal emphasis was placedon gardening, hunting, and gathering. In the vast highcountry of western Enga (2,100 m�) lived scattered mo-bile groups who depended heavily on hunting and gath-ering. Hunters were attributed great physical strengthand the possession of powerful ritual and magic. Shiftinghorticulturalists, who subsisted on taro and other gardenproducts supplemented by game meat and pork, inhab-ited the steep, narrow valleys below. Oral traditions ofwestern Enga depict culturally recognized distinctionsbetween “horticulturalists” and “hunters,” accompa-


nied by ambiguous relationships of tension and misun-derstanding, on the one hand, and marriage andexchange, on the other.8 The economy revolved aroundsubsistence agriculture, hunting, and the trade of non-agricultural products: axe stone, salt, black-palm wood,strings of bark fiber, foodstuffs, plumes, shells, and cos-metic oil. Pigs played a secondary role in economy andsociety. Luxury items such as shells, plumes, and cos-metic oil were readily borrowed and lent to be worn byall on ceremonial occasions; the presence of such goodsdid not signal the onset of social inequalities. A tradealliance for the export of salt and the import of axe stoneoriginated among the southeastern neighbors of the Engaand ran through the Saka Valley of eastern Enga to cen-tral Enga, where the renowned salt springs were located(fig. 2).

From the very early generations Enga appears to havebeen an open society of travelers, traders, and experi-menters. Mobility was high as people sought trade op-portunities, alliances, and spouses, attended rituals, har-vested products of the high forest, or took refuge afterwarfare or severe frost.9 New ideas were introduced onlong-distance voyages and internal ones, for example,sessions for dream interpretation that rattled existingrepresentations of reality and opened new possibilities.A broad repertoire of cults was practiced in all areas ofEnga to promote fertility, prosperity, and solidarity. Pur-chase of cult rites, sacred objects, incantations, and theservices of ritual experts from other groups who appearedmore prosperous was commonplace (Strathern 1994,Wiessner and Tumu 1999).

A sense of isolation pervades early historical tradi-tions—houses were widely distributed over the land-scape, spouses difficult to find, new group members wel-comed, and public events attended joyously. ThroughoutEnga two spheres of kinship structured networks of mu-tual support and reduced the transaction costs of manyforms of exchange. Patrilineally inherited clan member-ship furnished a pool of people who cooperated in agri-cultural enterprises, defense, procurement of spouses,and communication with the spirit world. Equality ofall male clan members ensured that each family heldrights over land, labor, and distribution of household pro-duce and received due assistance from group members.Residence was ideally patrilocal, though in practice newmembers were frequently recruited through maternal oraffinal ties. Affinal and maternal ties established byexogamous marriage and maintained by reciprocal ex-change provided access to resources and assistance out-

8. Hunting groups had access to the rich resources of the high forest,including marsupials, pandanus nuts, a variety of edible greens,berries, acorns, mushrooms, seeds, and possibly wild tubers (i.e.,Pueraria lobata [Watson 1968]). That they engaged in food exchangewith horticulturalists is well recorded in oral tradition, but theirdegree of dependence is uncertain. Archaeological excavations atKutepa Rock Shelter in the Porgera Valley carried out by Jo Mangihave revealed at least 10,000 years of periodic occupation at 2,300m.9. Watson’s (1985) description of Tairora mobility, its reasons, andits role in “defining people by where they go” is reminiscent ofdescriptions in early Enga historical traditions.

side the clan. Equality was the ground rule that fosteredcooperation and trust in these external relations (Feil1984) and facilitated residential mobility. That is, im-migrants who were given land on the basis of affinal ormaternal ties were welcomed and treated as equals; theirchildren became full-fledged clan members. Conceptu-ally and in practice these two spheres of kinship andeconomics (corporate and network-based strategies, inthe terms of Blanton et al. 1996) were tightly integrated.The Enga describe this integration by a metaphor of birdsthat roost in the same tree, fly out in different directionsin the morning seemingly pursuing their own interests,and return with what they have gleaned to the same nestin the evening.

A strong ethic of equality prevailed within the sexesfor married men and women. Though it took some yearsto build reputation, there was no pronounced age hier-archy. Equality of men was asserted by coalitions of al-lied clan members who ensured that their brothers re-ceived equal rights to land, spouses, and assistance fromthe clan. Relatives of married women, particularly malerelatives, enforced equality of women by demanding thattheir “daughters” receive as much land, assistance inlabor, and wealth for exchanges as did other women,particularly co-wives. Nonetheless, a certain degree ofcompetition was permitted. The tone of some early nar-ratives suggests that equality was maintained both bystriving to do as well as others (or somewhat better) andby leveling those who got out of line. Women most likelycompeted against potential co-wives and sought to chan-nel family wealth to their natal kin as they did in latergenerations, though their early exploits are rarely de-tailed. Men competed with other men in warfare, hunt-ing, and trade; men of influence are occasionally namedin early historical traditions.10 “Name” was gained fromdistribution, not retention and accumulation.

Some insight into sources of influence in the past canbe derived from metaphorical accounts of “legacies”passed on by tribal founders to their sons. For centraland eastern Enga these include the spear (warfare), thepig rope and pig club (ability to raise pigs and pay warreparations), the digging stick (agriculture), the bambooknife (oratory), the stick for planting taro (the staple cropprior to the sweet potato and an essential food for cer-emonial events), and the bundle of charms for attractingwealth of all kinds. Important in the heritage of westerngroups are hunting ability and meat distribution. In notraditions are objects representing ritual power or abilityto attract multiple wives passed on from mythical tribalfounders to sons. Finally, genealogies for the early gen-erations indicate that the most gifted men were polyg-ynous, an inequality accepted by clan members because

10. I will avoid using the term “big-man” as formulated by Sahlins(1963) because (1) it encompasses a wide range of leadership styles(Brown 1990, Godelier and Strathern 1991, Lederman 1990, Roscoe2000), (2) the role of big-men described in the ethnographic liter-ature has been significantly shaped by interaction with colonialregimes (Gordon and Meggitt 1985), and (3) it is difficult to ascertainat what point in Enga history influential men can be called big-men.


Fig. 2. Schematic representation of major migrations after the introduction of the sweet potato. 1–3, majormigrations shortly after the introduction of the sweet potato which are cited in the text. In reality the situationis much more complex than portrayed here. Between the earliest generations and the fourth generation beforethe present we recorded the migration histories for ca. 107 clans or large segments of clans in eastern Enga, 105in central Enga, and 58 in western Enga. In addition, there were frequent migrations of lineages and families,particularly in western Enga.

polygyny increased external ties and numbers of off-spring born to the clan. All in all, social inequalities areportrayed as slight and ephemeral—early Enga history isa history without heroes.11

The segmentary lineage system of Enga divided thepopulation by descent into tribes, clans, subclans, andlineages, each with their own leaders of achieved status.As equals, parallel units competed and cooperated, strug-gling to maintain a balance of power and autonomy. In-tragroup disputes set off by meat sharing, work sharing,or gossip often led to the departure of one party, sug-gesting that leveling pressures were operative. Intergroupconflict over hunting rights, theft, or insult frequentlyescalated into wars supported by allies on both sides.Wars solved problems by spacing groups—the losers were

11. The division of influence between hunters, warriors, gardeners,traders, and others described in historical traditions and the waysin which their power was curbed recall some of the ethnographicdescriptions by Godelier (1982) for the Anga of the eastern High-lands. It is not possible to determine the relative roles of warfareand exchange for building reputation for the earlier generations. Inlater generations young men displayed skill and willingness to takerisks for group benefit through warfare, but brilliance in exchangewas far more important for building prestige.

displaced or disbanded and absorbed by allied groupswhere they had close kin. There are no accounts in thehistorical traditions in which groups were subsumed orsubordinated by victors. At no time in Enga history island shortage presented as a serious concern; it waslargely labor that limited production.12

By contrast to equality within the sexes, differencesand corresponding moral evaluations between the sexeswere pronounced and cosmologically stipulated (seeKelly 1993). Gender inequality was founded in “contam-ination” beliefs that relegated the influence of womento the private sphere, from where they worked to attunethe plans and decisions of men to their own interests(Kyakas and Wiessner 1992). Beliefs that separated menand women had as much to do with male-male as withmale-female relations and minimized competition be-tween the sexes. Amongst other things, gender inequal-ity protected household wealth and the ties on whichmen’s careers were founded: women, as removed from

12. To say that there is no land shortage per se is not to say thatEnga have little concern with land and its defense (Meggitt 1977:183). Land is critical to a household’s sustenance, pride, andindependence.


politics, were generally immune to violence and fled intimes of conflict with their possessions, children, andpigs, thereby safeguarding the family wealth and bondsfor future exchanges.

Ritual life among the Enga of earlier generations, as oflater ones, stressed equal participation of all men in com-municating with the spirit world. Cults underwroteequality in that all able-bodied men participated in thecommunal hunt prior to the ceremonies and all familiesmade roughly equal contributions to preparing and pro-visioning cults. Clans of a tribe provided material for thecult house and one or more peripheral posts that signifiedtheir contribution to the whole. Elders or ritual expertspresided over certain ceremonies owing to greater knowl-edge or experience, but such participation did not resultin hierarchies based on ritual knowledge or power, nordid ritual expertise spill over into secular affairs. Antag-onisms were expressed in verbal or physical aggression;witchcraft, practiced only by some fringe Enga, was usedneither to preserve equality nor to create inequality.

Thus, at the starting point for this study, Enga “egal-itarianism” had a number of characteristics whichsteered the choices of enterprising men. First, mild com-petition to become “first among equals” was permittedand even encouraged if it brought benefits to the clan.Second, coalitions of men ensured equal access to re-sources, support, and communication with the spiritworld for adult clansmen of all ages. Third, exchangepartners in different clans were treated as equals—a re-lationship that was staunchly defended regardless of age.Fourth, it was largely men who participated in enforcingequality to protect their interests; women had to workthrough male agnatic kin to secure their rights. At higherlevels of organization, coalitions of allied subclans orclans ensured equality of parallel social units. Such fea-tures depart significantly from configurations of equalityin other known egalitarian societies such as the !KungSan, who are often used as an egalitarian prototype (Lee1993). Among the !Kung overt competition is stringentlyconstrained, men and women play similar roles in en-forcing equality within and between the sexes, there areno mechanisms to defend the equality of social units,and individuals who gain access to the spirit worldthrough trance hold influential positions in the group.

Post–Sweet-Potato Developments

eastern enga

The sweet potato slipped into the garden regime of east-ern Enga without note in historical traditions. Initiallyits impact was only an indirect one: an influx of non-Enga immigrants from higher regions seeking good gar-den land. Some of these immigrants came from keygroups in the salt and axe trade to the south and east(fig. 2, 1). Once established, they challenged the positionof Enga from the Saka Valley in controlling the well-developed alliance for the salt and axe trade. In response,Saka Valley Enga constructed a new system through

which to raise wealth, which they invested in alliancesto block the plans of their rivals from immigrant groups.As the legend goes, they sent messages and initiatorygifts to partners along well-established trade routes, ask-ing them to provide wealth in the form of pigs on creditrather than by traditional barter. When wealth arrivingalong these chains of finance reached the Saka Valley,influential men used it to contract marriages or otheralliances. These were investments in the sense that theypromised long-term exchange and mutual support. Re-turns from marriage exchanges or other newly contractedalliances together with wealth from home productionwere used to repay partners in a public festival. Thus,through the concatenation of former trade partnerships,chains of finance were constructed to make up the skel-eton of what was to become the Tee ceremonial exchangecycle (fig. 3). The spread of this system of finance anddisplay, called tee lenge (to ask for), is recorded in thehistorical traditions of other groups along the major traderoutes around the seventh generation before the present(Wiessner and Tumu 1998 :164–65).

The Tee cycle opened many opportunities and reducedthe transaction costs associated with long-distanceexchange. Through Tee it became possible to elicit fi-nance on credit from people who were beyond the usualbounds of kinship reckoning—finance through Teechains thus partially decoupled economics from kinship,its protocols and etiquette. Formal public wealth distri-butions conferred “name” on managers of wealth andfostered trust in their competence. Finally, skillful ma-nipulation of chains of finance maximized the amountof wealth arriving in one place at one point in time,giving recipients the financial clout to engage in largerprojects without having to feed large herds of pigs whilethey slowly amassed wealth for distribution.13 The Teecycle, in contrast to the Melpa Moka (Strathern 1971),involved no competition between partners. Partnerswere defined as equals, and though a man might striveto give generously to please his partner, such small in-crements were never given in the spirit of competition.Competition in the early Tee existed only between menin different clans striving to control the trade.

During the first two to three generations after the Teecycle was initiated, it was performed on a very smallscale. Few people in a clan participated, even though itwas open to all. Oral records indicate that the most suc-cessful distributed no more than five to ten pigs in oneTee festival and that the number of clans involved waslimited to some 10–20. As a network that clung to clansalong trade routes, it did not attract much attention, andits potential remained unrealized. Why? First of all, theaverage person who was not a regular participant in the

13. Interestingly, pigs, which had previously circulated for localfeasts, were the only forms of currency produced in Enga that couldbe rapidly intensified to meet the needs of increasing political andeconomic complexity at the time. As a result, they began to beexchanged over great distances, even though the transport of re-calcitrant animals could be taxing. See Lemonnier (1996) and Kelly(1988) for interesting discussions of the pig as a currency ofexchange.


Fig. 3. Spheres of the Tee cycle, the Great Wars, and Kepele cult networks.

trade had little incentive to join and lacked the appro-priate ties to do so. Second, the early Tee cycle revolvedaround pig exchange, but the economy was not gearedto pig production. Agricultural production levels wereset to meet household subsistence needs, hunting sup-plied meat for many events, allies in warfare were oftencompensated with land gained, and bridewealth pay-ments were furnished to a significant extent by tradegoods. The few pigs that were raised for wedding, cult,or funeral feasts derived much of their sustenance fromforaging. Only men and women with broader designs sawthe potential of the pig as a currency that could be in-tensively raised and invested to promote individual andclan interests. Some historical testimonies directly re-port the efforts of influential men to encourage pig pro-duction to increase clan wealth but state that most peo-ple were not interested—pig husbandry is drudgery, andits benefits had not yet been established. There were fewplaces to spend hard-earned pigs.

This situation changed in approximately the fifth gen-eration when a new dilemma arose—circumscription.Up until this time, population growth was portrayed asadvantageous, providing more eligible spouses nearbyand more exchange opportunities as well as increasingthe size and strength of groups. Thereafter naratives be-gin to reflect some of the problems caused by growth

(see also Modjeska 1982). As land filled up and intraclanwars led to fissioning, sufficient room for spacing hostilesubclans within tribal land was no longer available, andmigration of one party to an outlying area was undesir-able. The clans divided were often “brother” clans,tightly linked by ties of kinship and exchange. Warfareruptured their essential interactions and potential toform alliances against major enemies. Consequently,clan leaders sought to institute peacemaking proceduresso that they could split into two or more groups but thenstay put. The few accounts that describe early attemptsat peacemaking tell of ambiguous feelings toward“brother” groups turned enemy, confusion, and the ex-ploratory efforts of men who stepped forward to reestab-lish peace. The solution, compensatory words and pay-ments, was composed of the sum total of gifts offered byfellow clansmen to bereaved relatives in the victim’sclan coordinated into a formal clanwide distribution. Pig-lets were then earmarked for a series of reciprocal ex-changes to take place over the next two to three years.During the protracted period of piglet growth, hostilitieswere discouraged by the promise of wealth to come andthe healing hands of time set to work.

Peacemaking through the exchange of war reparationshad a number of profound effects on Enga economy and


politics.14 First, it provided an institutional frameworkwhich made it possible to reestablish trust and resumesocial and economic exchange that had been severelydisrupted by warfare. Second, it furnished a new role forpigs, one that had import for every clan member. Third,it established a forum in which all clan members couldcreate new ties with families in opposing groups andthereby reduce the possibility of recurrent conflict.Fourth, it opened a new arena for men to gain influ-ence—negotiation and coordination of war reparationsrequired men with outstanding knowledge and politicalskills. Fifth, the possibility of peacemaking allowed forwarfare to be contained and used surgically for a widerange of purposes from establishing a balance of powerto fostering exchange and providing a forum in whichleaders could make their names (Sillitoe 1978). There-after, some wars were fought briefly for the exchangethat would ensue. Finally, war reparations broadened therole of the Tee cycle from an institution of finance forstrategies in the trade to an institution of finance for warreparations. When people of eastern Enga realized thepotential of the Tee cycle, clans of eastern Enga joinedone by one. Around this time a new locus of competitionentered the Tee cycle: competition between fellow clans-men to assemble and distribute wealth as one means togain influence.

central enga

Though historical traditions do not tell of the introduc-tion of the sweet potato to central Enga, they do tell ofexperiments with the new crop, followed by the exten-sive reorganization and consolidation of groups inhab-iting the high country. The names and designs of themen who achieved tribal integration are not detailed;however, it is clear that the invention and circulation ofcults played an important role in the process. Ancestralcults were imported from the west, given local names,and refitted to local needs of coordinating tribal segmentsfor collective action. Even more significant was the in-stitution of communal bachelors’ cults (Sangai) to sup-plement former individual rites of growth. Here youngmen were brought into retreat in the seclusion of a foresthut, where they joined in a group marriage with a spiritwoman who was believed to transform the handsomeand the ugly alike into physically and socially competentyoung adults. Praise poetry for the accomplishments ofthe spirit woman laid down the ideals for men andmolded the protagonists of upcoming generations. TheSangai did much to structure relations between men—itproduced cohorts with shared values and strong bondsof loyalty to one another and placed the education ofyouth firmly in the hands of elders. It appears that com-munal bachelors’ cults originated in central Enga aroundthe seventh generation before the present. Shortly after-ward they were imported by clans in the Lagaip Valley

14. See Lemonnier (1990) for a comprehensive and insightful over-view of compensation and war reparations in the highlands of NewGuinea.

to the west, homogenizing ideas and values among peo-ples of different valley systems.

The upshot of the reorganization of groups in the highcountry of central Enga was a number of major offensiveslaunched as groups from the high country, where agri-culture was precarious, sought to take the frost-free fer-tile land of the Ambum Valley (fig. 2, 2). The originalinhabitants were driven out to the northeast, where theyestablished new residences and prospered. The victors,hard-pressed to fill the land they had taken, welcomedimmigrants from other tribes. In the course of the Am-bum wars much was gained in addition to land—the pro-liferation of exchange ties, excitement, and opportunitiesfor aspiring leaders. While formerly wars had been foughtat the level of subclans or clans, for the Ambum warsmuch larger units—“brother” tribes and their allies—cooperated.

Out of efforts to perpetuate the positive aspects of theAmbum wars without the negative ones, high death tollsand loss of land, the Great Ceremonial Wars were born(Wiessner and Tumu 1998). The heroes of the initial ep-isodes of the Great Wars are not named, nor are theirgoals and organizational tactics detailed; narratives de-scribing later episodes eclipse the earliest ones. All thatis remembered is that, drawing on coalitions formed inthe Ambum wars and other struggles, “tournamentwars” were organized in which emphasis was placed ondisplay rather than defeat and festivities rather thanfighting.15 It was said that the Great Wars were “plantedlike a garden for the harvest that would follow” duringthe subsequent exchanges. Allied tribes, who providedthe “owners of the fight” with housing, food, water, andallied warriors, hosted the Great Wars. Combat tookplace on designated battlefields belonging to the hosts,where no land could be gained or lost. When the ap-pointed time for battle approached, Great War leaders,who were selected from among the ranks of prominentmen, assembled their tribes, hosts, and allies near thebattle site. Their battle plans were drawn and a fightingspirit was brewed during a week or more of song anddance.

According to historical traditions and eyewitness ac-counts, when the formal beginning to the tournamentwas called, Great War leaders (watenge) challenged theircounterparts from the opposing side in spectacular dis-plays. Watenge were to be captured or otherwise hu-miliated but not killed, for they would be the ones toorganize ensuing exchanges of wealth. By day the menfought in full ceremonial dress in front of hundreds orthousands of spectators and rows of dancing women whocheered on their heroes. By night they ate and drank withhosts and courted women. But the Great Wars were byno means mock wars. For example, during the last GreatWar, fought in the late 1930s, many were wounded andthree on one side, four on the other were killed. However,casualties remained relatively low owing to the structure

15. There are some vague suggestions in early historical traditionsthat western Enga might have had semiritualized wars prior to theintroduction of the sweet potato. More we do not know.


of the battles, which involved the exchange of volleys ofarrows fired from a distance between extended lines ofwarriors. High-casuality tactics such as ambushes andnight raids were avoided. As in smaller wars, battles con-tinued for weeks or months until war leaders announcedthe end, broke their weapons in half, and cast them intothe river. The wars were said to be without victors andwithout anger—deaths were not avenged. The breakingof spears initiated a series of exchanges that would con-tinue for two to four years in which hosts and allies werecompensated for their efforts and relationships that hadformed between them during battle were transformedinto exchange partnerships. Marriages contracted duringthe Great Wars created new pathways of interaction.

Four Great Wars were fought recurrently in centralEnga from approximately the sixth generation before thepresent until the second (fig. 3) (Wiessner and Tumu1998:273–88). Virtually everybody except those maimedor killed in battle benefited. The competition signaledstrength of alliances, established a balance of power, andfurnished a formal context in which to fight out localgrudges ensuing from smaller wars. People spanning fourvalley systems were drawn together for a common pur-pose and had weeks or months to assess the attributesof potential exchange partners and establish trust. Thefestive exchanges and marriages following the warsturned new friendships into formalized relationships ofexchange for all, though Great War leaders and othermanagers of wealth attracted more wealth than ordinarymen. Pigs, whose production could be readily intensifiedto meet the needs of Great War exchanges, became acurrency with widely accepted value. In the years thatfollowed Great War episodes, small, vicious wars werefought as they had been throughout Enga history. Whenthe momentum generated by a Great War episode woreoff after some ten years, a new episode was launched.

It would be difficult to imagine a context more ame-nable to initiatives on the part of enterprising men tobuild power without treading on the toes of others. TheGreat Wars furnished a forum for rallying large groupsof followers and provided benefits for participants with-out placing disproportionate demands on the householdproduction of leaders. The spirit of group competition,together with the flamboyant performances of Great Warleaders to challenge and humiliate their opponents inthe name of their “team,” made people eager to investin their representatives. Very important, Great War lead-ers were chosen not only by their own sides but by theenemy, who called on desired opponents to step forward,organize their men, and represent their side. In the con-text of popular demand from both sides and public desirefor continuity of leadership to reduce disruptive internalcompetition, within a generation after the wars were in-itiated the position was inherited. Historical traditionsdescribe how the public called on the sons or nephewsof Great War leaders to “replace” their fathers (Wiessnerand Tumu 1998:appendix 2), but genealogies suggest that

only those who displayed competence actually did so.Achievement still played a role.16

In the era of the Great Wars, shifts in values wereexpressed in poetry and proverbs. While early bachelors’cult poetry centered on physical transformation, in thegenerations of the Great Wars new verses citing thenames of prominent men as role models were added tohighlight accomplishments in production and exchange.The proverb “You need a man,” lauding the value of allmen, was modified by a parallel one, “Good and healthytrees produce good fruits, and poor trees produce poorfruits.” The rules of the game were changing.

western enga

In western Enga, the sweet potato arrived during a timeof famine and was adopted immediately. Its role as afamine-relief food is recalled in both oral tradition andritual. Population shifts then occurred as former“hunter-gatherers” moved into the Lagaip Valley in re-sponse to the reliable subsistence base provided by thesweet potato (fig. 2, 3). There they procured land fromaffinal and maternal kin in horticultural groups inexchange for various forms of support. Economic andsocial adjustments were complex—population redistri-bution afforded new economic opportunities but also in-cited tension as people of different lifestyles meshed.This is evident in a history replete with small, viciouswars that caused many subclans to migrate into outlyingareas far from the central valleys in search of a betterlife (Wohlt 1978). Drawing on the long-standing traditionof complex ritual life in western Enga, responses to con-flict were largely ritual ones, particularly in the earlygenerations. Cults circulated widely out of efforts tosolve new problems and achieve new means of in-tegration.

Of circulating cults, the most impressive was the Ke-pele ancestral cult. The Kepele had its roots in the formerritual of high-country hunting groups. After the intro-duction of the sweet potato, when horticultural and“hunting” groups settled side by side, the Kepele waselaborated into an institution that assembled hundredsand in later generations thousands of participants andspectators for five days of feasting, ritual, and exchange.During the five-day Kepele celebrations tribes wereunited, boys initiated, communication with the ances-tors restored, and visitors entertained. Equality of maletribal members was expressed by the expectation thateach man furnish one pig and one pig only for the cer-emonies and through the immediate and equitable dis-tribution of food. On these festive occasions, pigs tookon ritual significance and became standard currency, ori-entations favoring small circles of close kin were ex-panded to encompass the brotherhood of all tribal mem-bers, and vicious cycles of runaway aggression between

16. The role of such tournament events in establishing and per-petuating institutionalized leadership is reminiscent of the ballgames, prehistoric and historic, in Mesoamerica (Fox 1996, Hill,Blake, and Clark 1998).


clans of a tribe were halted. Kepele cults of over 50 west-ern Enga tribes were woven into a network held togetherby circulating ritual experts, sharing of rites and inno-vations, and attendance by relatives from other tribes inthe network (fig. 3).

If one considers the Kepele cult network as a whole,its sphere of influence is equal to that of the Great Warsand the Tee cycle. The atmosphere of cooperation andtrust generated in the Kepele, the gathering of peoplefrom far and wide, and the cessation of hostilities forcelebration paved the way for inter- and intragroupexchange while reducing associated risks. From organ-izing these great events, men earned prestige that al-lowed them to elicit cooperation and license. However,in contrast to the situation in the Great Wars and theTee cycle, opportunities for investment in relationshipsand ensuing profits were few (Wiessner 2001).

During the fourth generation men of the west, likethose in other parts of Enga, found a new way of gaininginfluence with the institution of peacemaking proce-dures. As a result of efforts in many areas of life, overthe generations they brought about a shift from a het-erarchy of power (Ehrenreich, Crumley, and Levy 1995)distributed amongst ritual experts, renowned cassowaryhunters, traders, mediators, and warriors to a hierarchytopped by managers of wealth and political relations. Butbecause of their starting point in hunting and gatheringor shifting agriculture and the poorer agricultural con-ditions of western Enga, they never gained wealth orregional influence comparable to that of their counter-parts in eastern or central Enga.

The Merging of the Great Wars and the TeeCycle

By the fourth generation before the present (table 1) thepopularity of the Great Wars was mounting and placingheavy demands on the “owners of the fight” and theirhosts. Seeking new ways to finance their tournamentwars, Great War leaders of central Enga, whose clansspanned the Tee cycle and Great Wars, traveled to east-ern Enga. Drawing on their fund of influence from high-profile performance in the Great Wars and inherited po-sition, they effectively campaigned to lengthen Teechains and time Tee cycles to deliver wealth for GreatWar exchanges. Of particular note in such efforts wasthe Great War leader and Tee organizer Pendaine ofLenge, in central Enga (born ca. 1870), a modest monog-amous man of few words but a spectacular performer inthe context of the Great Wars. Once the two networkswere connected, some phases of the Tee cycle were usedto bring wealth from eastern to central Enga to fuel theGreat War exchanges and others to channel wealth fromthe Great War exchanges back to eastern Enga to repaycreditors. Both networks flourished. Historical testi-monies and genealogies indicate that families at the topof both networks intermarried in order to combine in-formation and establish ties crucial to the coordination

of the two networks within a circle of emerging elites.Meanwhile, at the eastern end of the Tee cycle, Tee man-agers sought to consolidate power by investing in pearlshells, valuables which could not be produced by all, didnot have limited life spans or voracious appetites, andwere most accessible to those with well-establishedlong-distance ties.

It was with the development of complex regional pol-itics to link the two exchange systems that the natureof leadership began to change, as is recorded in the his-tory of the family of Pendaine, the man who first coor-dinated the Great Wars and Tee cycle (Wiessner andTumu 1998:330–31, quoting Kopio Toya Lambu, YakaniTimali clan, Lenge):

It is said that my great-grandfather Kepa [Pendaine’sfather] did not wear a headdress of bird-of-paradisefeathers, nor did he boast. Kepa did not sing anysongs about how wealthy he was. He wanted to befriends with everybody and was very cautious not tocreate bad feelings among his people and especiallywith his Tee partners. It was in the time of Kepathat strong leaders began to emerge. Towards theend of his lifetime, when Kepa was an old man,competition began to appear in the Tee cycle andalong with it Tee politics. The Tee and strong lead-ership grew together and reinforced each other. Thisdid not happen overnight.

Kopio goes on to mention that as the Tee grew, a newcounting system was introduced, replacing a former sys-tem based on body parts that reached 27. In the newsystem, people counted by twos up to 40 and then con-tinued with one bundle of 40 and 2, 4, 6, up to twobundles of 40, and so on up into the hundreds. Of thenew system Kopio remarks: “All of these things hap-pened following one important event: the institution ofthe counting system. Before its introduction nobody re-ally knew for sure who was the real kamongo (leader).When the counting system was introduced, people wereable to tell who was the real kamongo.” Apparently, withincreasing regional competition, there was interest incomparing achievements of kamongo between groupsand between different Tee cycles.

Ritual developments were transacted hand-in-handwith exchange. Notable among these were initiatives ofeastern clans to import bachelors’ cults that were seenas responsible for producing the magnificent cohorts ofmen displayed in the Great Wars. An unintended con-sequence of this bachelors’ cult transmission was thestandardization of ideals for young men and ideas onrelations between the sexes so essential for facilitatingthe interarea marriages on which exchange networks de-pended. Women of eastern Enga had input in the thirdgeneration before the present when they added a phaseof disruptive courtship to bachelors’ cult emergence cer-emonies in which girls publicly expressed marriagepreferences.

The merging of the Great Wars and the Tee cycle posedproblems of coordination, cooperation, and timing that


table 2Schematic Relationship of the Aeatee Cult to the Organization of the Tee Cycle and the Flow of Wealth toand from the Tee Cycle and Great Wars Exchanges

Aeatee Cult Tee Cycle Great Wars

Phase 1Prepare building materials for

cult house, marsupial feast,tribe united

Phase 2Prepare ceremonial grounds,

marsupial feast. Tee organ-izers come up from easternclans

Saandi Pingi: initiatory gifts of piglets,pork, goods, and valuables sent fromwest to east with Tee organizers

Wealth from Great War exchangeschanneled into initiatory gifts forthe Tee cycle

Phase 3House construction, pork

feast, more initiatory giftsgiven to guests from east

More initiatory gifts sent east Same as above

Phase 4Fertility rites, marsupial feast,

tribe unitedPhase 5Rites for ancestral stones,

pork feast, Tee organizersset off for the east to re-quest the main gifts in theTee cycle

Tee Pingi: main gifts sent from east to west Main Tee gifts channeled intoGreat War exchanges

Phase 6Burning of cult house and

major pork feast; when theAeatee cult is completed,the Yae phase of the Teecycle begins

Yae Pingi: return gifts of butchered porksent from west to east

Opponents in Great Warscompete to burn Aeatee culthouse

Wealth from Great War exchangessent east in Yae Pingi

note: Though the relation of the Aeatee to the Tee cycle remained relatively constant, the Tee cycle and the Great Wars werechanging so rapidly from the fifth generation on that this scheme represents but one of several possible ways in which the threesystems were linked.

threatened to foil the efforts of even the most astute Teecycle managers. It was in this context that a version ofthe Kepele ancestral cult, which had been imported fromwestern Enga at an earlier date and practiced on a smallscale, was expanded and molded into quite a differentinstitution in the name of furthering prosperity. Andprosperity it brought by facilitating the coordination ofthe burgeoning exchange cycles. The names of the menwho shaped the cult and their political intent are notdetailed in historical traditions. What we do know is thatthe Kepele was renamed Aeatee, its western “praisename,” and crafted into an elaborate six-phase cultspread out over a period of some five to ten years (table2). The Aeatee, like other cults of the time, departed fromthe male-dominated ideology of past ancestral cults andemphasized essential cooperation between the sexes.

Like the Kepele, the Aeatee assembled entire tribes,articulated relations between clans, restored communi-cation with the ancestors, and evoked confidence andprosperity. Unlike the Kepele, the Aeatee was directlygeared to the needs of secular exchange networks, thoughsuch connections were masked. During the initialphases, Tee managers from the east were invited to at-tend, and in the shadow of this lavish cult the Tee wasorganized. Each of the later stages of the Aeatee was thenattuned carefully to the timing of the three-phase Tee

cycle—that is, when Aeatee festivities were completeand celebrants had returned home, the appropriate phaseof the Tee cycle would be launched. In this process, re-lations of equality and inequality were juxtaposed.Equality of all men and group interest were first ex-pressed in cult rites and then individuals were challengedto break with the same through entrepreneurial tacticsin Tee exchange.

In a sense the Tee cycle can be seen as an institutioncrafted from three exchange networks: the early Tee cy-cle of eastern Enga, the Great Wars of central Enga, andthe Kepele cult network of western Enga. Some Enga saythat it was the Aeatee that made the Tee possible (Lacey1975). At a time when organizing the Tee cycle involvedcoordinating some 100–200 widely dispersed clans, Aea-tee celebrations did much to reduce costs of communi-cation and coalescence. They demonstrated the unity,prosperity, and readiness of tribes for the Tee cycle, gath-ered key managers from the entire network in one placeat one time, and focused the energy necessary to launcha new phase of the Tee cycle. Years of footwork in therugged Enga landscape could not accomplish what theAeatee achieved in a week of celebrations.17

17. Other clans in the Tee followed suit by importing cults to dem-onstrate prosperity and gather crowds to plan the Tee (Wiessner


For some decades, managers spanning the Tee cycleand the Great Wars were able to use their informationadvantage to keep the two systems apart and profit bybeing major players in each.18 Despite such efforts, moreand more participants in the Great Wars became awareof the advantages of the Tee cycle, and, feeling that theTee might bring them more wealth at lower cost thanthe Great Wars, they joined. Around 1939 the last of theGreat Wars was fought; thereafter Great War exchangenetworks were subsumed by the Tee cycle. Many newbranches were added to the Tee cycle over the next dec-ades, facilitated by the colonial administration’s ban onwarfare, to constitute a network of some 375 clans (fig.3).

According to historical traditions, the motivation ofGreat War leaders for replacing the Great Wars with theTee cycle was to reduce the immense organizational bur-den of the Great Wars, increase relative individual gains,and avoid senseless deaths. But in opting for the Teecycle Great War leaders made a fatal error for the insti-tutionalization of leadership. In contrast to leadership inthe Great Wars, leadership in the Tee cycle was not in-herited, though some elders say that it was difficult formen outside of a Tee manager’s patrilineage, “people ofone blood,” to rise to the top.19 The persistence of egal-itarian exchange institutions at lower levels such asbridewealth, child growth payments, and funerary pres-tations that fed wealth into the Tee cycle allowed am-bitious men to challenge those on top. Whereas a singlechain of collaborators had ushered wealth from one endof the Tee network to another in preceding generations,after the Great Wars were discontinued ambitious in-dividuals who could not break into the central chain ofelite formed parallel competing chains (Feil 1984), intro-ducing a new dimension of competition into the Tee.Competing leaders in a single clan could belong to dif-ferent chains, each with its own designs for the timingand course of the Tee. Nonetheless, prior to the colonialperiod, once one chain had launched a potentially suc-cessful Tee cycle, clan interest took precedence over in-ternal competition and clan “brothers” joined forces andput on a good show for clan “name.”20

and Tumu 1999). Notable among these is the female-spirit cult,which was imported by influential men of eastern Enga withinliving memory of elders or their fathers. The female-spirit cult(Strathern 1970, 1979; Strathern and Stewart 2000), like the Aeatee,celebrated male-female cooperation and associated a new valuable,the pearl shell, with supernatural power.18. For instance, Kyakas Sapu of the Yanaitini Lanekepa clan toldus in 1991: “We did not want these people to see our source of pigs.Those places [where the Great Wars were held] were our source ofpigs and were referred to as our ‘Tee tree’ in figurative speech. . . .We told them [Tee managers from the east] that these places werethe lands of savages. We did so because we did not want them tosee these places; if they did it would have weakened our position.”19. Meggitt (1965:17–19) calculated that the average size of a pa-trilineage in central Enga was 48 members or 7.5 families. Patri-lineage members usually know their precise genealogical con-nections.20. This was to change during the colonial era with pacificationand conversion to Christianity. At this time two unifying clan ac-tivities, warfare and ancestral cults, were discontinued, permittinga greater degree of individualism.

But between the 1940s and 1970s what had been astreamlined system gave way to shifting factionalismand ruthless competition (Feil 1984) as new wealth andstatus positions were introduced by Europeans. Eldersmention four influences of European contact that madepowerful Tee managers lose their grip on the Tee: (1) Anyable-bodied man could work for Europeans, obtainwealth through wages or looting during administrationpatrols, and participate in the Tee cycle, bypassing tra-ditional channels for building wealth and reputation. (2)European goods (axes, bush knives, and shovels) couldbe taken to newly contacted areas by patrol membersand, as rare and highly desired goods, be exchanged forlarge pigs to be given in the Tee cycle. (3) Men hired asgo-betweens for the administration and Tee managersbuilt direct exchange ties with leading Tee managers, tiesthat were otherwise closed to those who did not marryinto leading lineages. (4) Owing to patrols, marriageswere contracted far outside the sphere of the Tee cycle,and as distant affinal kin were integrated into the Teeits boundaries were extended.21 Thus, a man of the fourthgeneration like Pendaine had kept the allegiance of ahuge following through his role as Great War leader andTee cycle organizer, commanding an extensive networkwith the help of a single wife, two children, servants,and loyal followers. His son Lambu, who received rec-ognition and support from the colonial administration,married 20 wives to try to accomplish the same and hadbetween 14 and 30 servants (kendemane, literally “ropedmen”), handicapped or dispossessed people recruitedfrom outside his clan. The sons of prominent Tee cyclemanagers were still in good positions to replace theirfathers, but they had to fight constantly to hold theirground.

What Changed?

Over a period of some 250–400 years after the introduc-tion of the sweet potato, significant changes took placein Enga. Population growth offered many new opportu-nities and was a contributing factor to the settlement offringe areas of Enga.22 The economy was transformedfrom one based on shifting taro horticulture and huntingand gathering to a surplus economy based on sweet po-tato cultivation and intensive pig husbandry. A heter-archy of power distributed over hunters, traders, warri-ors, ritual experts, and managers gave way to hierarchyas leaders steered an economy with the potential for

21. Testimonies of Kyakas Sapu, Kambao Lambu, Ambone Mati,Lete Aiyaka, and Sowelya Kanopato, July 2001. Interestingly, noneof these elders mentioned that the cessation of warfare was a centralfactor in the expansion of the Tee cycle, though when asked theysaid it probably was a contributing factor.22. We have estimated growth to be about 1.1% per annum (seeWiessner and Tumu 1998:116–17). Though this may seem high fora precontact population, most areas of Enga are free of tropicaldiseases, water sources are clean, the climate is temperate, and foodis plentiful. Enga elders name population growth as the cause ofsuch developments as clan fission, emigration, and the need forbetter means of communication.


rapid growth. Within the sphere of the Tee cycle and theGreat Wars a two-tiered system of leadership emerged(Pupu 1988). At the top were Tee managers and GreatWar leaders who mastered the large exchange networks.Beneath them were local leaders who managed internalclan affairs. Enterprising men of the sixth generation be-fore the present who participated in the Tee cycle wereable to distribute some 10 pigs; by the second generationsome were able to assemble and give away 250 pigs ormore together with numerous goods and valuables. Char-acter descriptions in historical traditions reflect a ten-dency toward the formalization of leadership. Whilethose from earlier generations depict personal traits oractions, those of later generations dwell on blackenedfaces, stance, grandeur, formal apparel, and eloquent or-atory, substituting the details of person with a moreanonymous cultural ideal. Over a period of some five tosix generations hierarchy had developed, inequality wasinherited in the context of the Great Wars, and Tee cyclemanagers and Great War leaders had achieved controlover institutions that stretched far beyond the bounda-ries of their clans. Their names were known far and wide.How did this situation come to be?

Agents and Egalitarian Institutions

Let us return to the first question: What was the role ofindividual maximizing strategies within existing insti-tutions in bringing about incremental change that led toinstitutionalized inequality? Throughout the course ofhistory the enterprising did gain some economic advan-tage by interpreting rules to their advantage or pushingthem to their limits. There is no reason to believe theyhad not done so long before the introduction of the sweetpotato. They farmed out pigs to others (who were repaidin piglets born) to profit from the land and labor of others,married more wives, attracted more unattached individ-uals to their labor forces, and enticed support from awider sphere of kin. Social competence, together withlicense conferred by prestige, allowed them to get awaywith more than the average person. They invested theirgains in attracting supporters and in constructing newinstitutions.

How far did such efforts bring them on the road toinequality? Comparison of the distribution of rights andresources depicted in the sixth to eighth generations withthat in the second to third generation produces a sur-prising answer. Except in western areas where former“hunters and gatherers” abandoned their lifestyle to be-come horticulturalists, basic institutions and ideologiesdescribed in early oral traditions persisted. Land contin-ued to be passed on in the family or lineage. When familyland was plentiful, as it was in many areas throughoutEnga history, men could give land to affinal kin if theyjoined the clan. However, strong opposition on the partof subclan members prevented them from releasing landto outsiders or taking the land of “brothers.” By the co-lonial era, “big-men” did not have significantly largerlandholdings per household member than their fellow

clansmen, though they had larger households and moreof their family land under cultivation (Meggitt 1974:191n. 43). The same applies to labor. At no point in Engahistory did men appropriate the labor of other householdsin their clans; strong ethics of equality saw to that. Thegreatest managers were able to attract more dispossessedor handicapped individuals from other clans into theirlabor forces, but these servants never lost their right tocome, go, and shift allegiances.23 Equal access to themeans of production left its mark on the landscape—thebasic structure and spacing of household compounds wasnot significantly altered with the expansion of exchangenetworks.

Throughout the time span considered, all men retainedthe right to bridewealth support from fellow clanspeople.Clansmen avenged every member, right or wrong, forharm inflicted upon them. Poverty barred no young manfrom marrying, and no man was forced into contractualdebt to procure a spouse. Genealogies indicate that po-lygamy was practiced from the earliest generations on,though marriage to more than two or three spouses wasrare in all generations (see also Meggitt 1965, Waddell1972, Wohlt 1978). Group members, who welcomedbrides to produce sons and daughters for the clan, didnot discourage polygyny. Rather, protest against multiplepolygamous marriages came from wives and coalitionsof in-laws. If a second or third wife received less thanother wives in terms of attention, land to cultivate, and,most important, wealth to give to her relatives, theyencouraged divorce and remarriage into a more econom-ically promising union. Only the most capable of mencould manage polygyny.24

In external exchange, each household received financ-ing for its enterprises from maternal and affinal kin out-side the clan, and all households “held onto their ownpig ropes” in ceremonial exchanges. That is to say,wealth was not pooled and distributed by managers dur-ing clan presentations; rather, each household gave itscontributions to its own partners in public and reapedthe returns. This right was enforced not only by clanmembers but also by maternal kin and in-laws, whosought to keep tabs on their gifts in order to be assuredof reciprocation.

There is only one area in which serious inroads weremade into the equal distribution of resources—access toinformation critical to managing the flow of wealth andideas in the great exchange networks. Of course, weknow little about the distribution of information in Engafor the early generations; however, the new techniquesof information management detailed in historicaltraditions do suggest significant developments. For ex-ample, most elders say that symbolic speech was elab-

23. This practice was not new—the few individuals who contrib-uted little to the clan and could not establish households had alwaysbeen held in ridicule and considered fair game for exploitation.24. In the colonial period, when leaders were given fixed officialstatus and greater access to wealth, some men engaged in hyper-polygyny. For instance, Lambu, the son of Pendaine, married 13wives; his domestic life was fraught with conflicts extending evento homicide between co-wives.


orated over generations to transmit messages in publicoratory that would be understood only by a select few.Men and women from leading families in the Tee cycleand the Great Wars intermarried as part of their effortsto restrict the flow of information essential to playingthe exchange networks in their favor. Managers spanningthe Tee cycle and Great Wars used deceit and rumor tokeep the two systems apart for one to two generations.Finally, leading families began to pass on family historieswhich detailed the strategies, failures, and accomplish-ments of their forebears so that younger members couldfind inspiration and legitimation in the actions of thosewho had gone before. The knowledge differential be-tween men interviewed was impressive—some menknew the history of vast exchange networks, otherscould hardly see beyond their garden fences. Nonethe-less, the information advantage did not go uncontested.Continual efforts were made by rivals to prevent othersfrom managing information by circulating disruptive ru-mors along the Enga telegraph: words shouted from ridgeto ridge and interpreted according to the designs of thereceivers.

New Institutions

The construction of new institutions was a task to whichmanagers devoted considerable effort and which in turngave them their greatest advantages—regional influence,information control, and access to new ideas. By buildingnew economic institutions such as the Tee cycle and theGreat Wars to reduce transaction costs and thereby makelarge-scale regional exchange profitable, managers gainedaccess to the resources of a much broader populationwithout draining the wealth of their own followers. It isthe material goods procured on regional voyages that re-main in the archaeological record; however, the less vis-ible ideas brought home from journeys had a greater im-pact on economy and society. Because new institutionsventured into unclaimed social and economic territory,new rules could be constructed without threatening ex-isting relationships.

In constructing the early Tee cycle, men appear to haveentertained visions no broader than the pursuit of im-mediate personal interests. However, the majority of theinstitutions that arose in the course of Enga history werenot a product of individual aggrandizement leading toinstitutional change. Rather, they originated when lead-ers recognized potential in spontaneous events, dis-cussed them with fellow clanspeople, and attempted toalter, formalize, and perpetuate them in such a way asto address current problems confronting their groups. Weare fortunate to have two well-documented cases of howspontaneous events affected institutional change. Thefirst occurred in the early 20th century when the GreatWar leader Pendaine mistakenly slew a beloved kinsmanduring one of the Great War battles. Thereafter he is saidto have weighed the value of the Great Wars against theTee cycle together with his fellow Yakani clansmen.They decided that discontinuing the Great Wars and

weaving their exchange networks into the Tee cyclewould produce greater prosperity while avoiding sense-less deaths. In this case, one institution was activelyselected over another. Other groups followed their lead,expanding the Tee cycle to unwieldy proportions. Thesecond incident occurred between 1915 and 1920 in thecontext of a bachelors’ cult festival. Two women of east-ern Enga, overcome by jealousy, broke the solemnity ofan emergence festival, pulling a man out of the danceline and fighting over him ferociously. So amused wasthe crowd that clan leaders did not intervene. The wordspread, and women from other clans followed suit. Aftersome consideration, men accepted their actions with“grudging tolerance” because they drew the desiredcrowds to witness the upcoming generation of men andthen linger to plan upcoming exchange events. Withintwo decades, aggressive female competition had becomea regular and regulated highlight of bachelors’ cults(Wiessner and Tumu 1998:241–43).

The acquisition of existing institutions from othergroups involved an even greater degree of intentionality.Cults and exchanges of other groups that were seen aspotentially beneficial were introduced to clan membersby leading men of a clan and their dimensions explored.If they were deemed promising, wealth was raised fortheir purchase or, in the case of the Tee, plans were madeto phase wealth distributions into the Tee cycle. Hereagain, the strongest selection pressure for their adoptionwas group interest, even though those who promotednew institutions were keenly aware of how they mightplay them to their own advantage as well.

Once acquired, new institutions went through a trialperiod in which most clansmen were involved. From his-torical traditions it is possible to identify at least sixfactors that gave new institutions appeal. The first wastheir utility in dealing with major perturbations, suchas problems ensuing from population shifts after the in-troduction of the sweet potato, population growth, andscalar stress generated by the large exchange networks.A second appeal was the potential of new institutionsfor financing existing exchanges which were essential toreproducing individual and clan autonomy—bride-wealth, compensation to allies, child growth payments,and funeral feasts. The new was summoned to supportthe old. A third appeal was factional competition (Brum-fiel 1994), as groups sought innovations which were per-ceived to enhance the prosperity of rivals. A fourth wasthe charisma of the men who backed innovations andthe ability of influential men to demonstrate that theyworked positively and produced what Meggitt (1967) hascalled the “gravy train.” A fifth appeal was that in prin-ciple all men had an equal chance to gain wealth andprestige through new institutions which regulated socialand economic exchange, though in practice some menwere in a better position to do so than others. Finally,new institutions appear to have been valued for theiranticipated strength and prosperity. Forward-looking at-titudes are expressed in narratives describing the en-trance of groups into the Tee cycle and the adoption ofbachelors’ cults, ancestral cults, and war reparations to


the enemy. Historical traditions present change as pos-itive and to be anticipated in the future. In view of theseselection processes, it is questionable whether “the in-dividualistic aggrandizer” is a meaningful unit of anal-ysis for societies in which personal welfare is so deeplyembedded in cooperative egalitarian coalitions (M.Strathern 1988, Strathern and Stewart 2000).

Ideology, Institutions, and Change

Ideologies were altered along with institutions as man-agers and their fellow clansmen imported cults and putnew ideas into practice. Most ideological change con-cerned the parameters governing cooperation and com-petition—whether competition could exist at all, withwhom, when, over what, and for what rewards. It waschanges to these rules of the game that allowed newinstitutions and social alliances to unfold. Spheres ofcooperation were expanded along paths paved by circu-lating cults, which standardized norms and values. Asgeographical horizons broadened, so did ideas concerningthe limits of the world and how it worked, giving Engathe impression of rapidly increasing social complexitythat is so often mentioned in historical traditions. Tol-erance for moderate competition was expanded and even-tually superseded by admiration for overt and flamboy-ant competition in the context of managing the greatexchange networks, as bachelors’ poetry molded ideasfor wealthy men. Meanwhile, the growing body of his-torical narratives softened the guidelines of “tradi-tion”—they presented growth, innovation, and outstand-ing performance by some as the expected course ofevents and primed young men to anticipate a lifetimefilled with changes.

Who could compete with whom changed littlethroughout the course of history. All adult clansmen re-mained potential equals in competition. Men andwomen were defined as different and not potential com-petitors. Kinsmen and exchange partners outside the clanremained cooperators and strict equals, by contrast toMelpa Moka, in which partners competed and engagedin alternating inequality (Strathern 1971). The primarycontexts for competition and cooperation also persisted:men competed in oratory, self-presentation, warfare, and,above all, exchange. They cooperated in agricultural en-terprises, procuring of brides, clan defense, and com-munication with the spirit world. Nonetheless, somechanges did take place. The position of Great War leaderbecame inherited and was thus removed from the sphereof intragroup competition. Moreover, as the dependencyof men on women in exchange increased, families be-came Tee-making units. The theme of the essential com-plementarity of men and women was placed at the centerof bachelors’, ancestral, and female-spirit cults, contrib-uting to the relaxation of relations between the sexes.In the 1930s and 1940s a number of widows participatedin the Tee in their own right, competing directly withmen. One woman, Takime, even became a prominentTee cycle manager (Kyakas and Wiessner 1992).

The import, export, and performance of cults con-stantly altered definitions of value. Gifts and commod-ities, particularly pigs and pearl shells, were given newworth and meaning through their association with thesacred in ancestral cults (Wiessner 2001). Verses addedto bachelors’ cult poetry that updated the ideals for menplaced increasing emphasis on success in ceremonialexchange. The stakes in competition also took on newdimensions. In the earlier generations those who ex-celled became mediators in internal relations and in re-lations with neighboring clans, managed polygynousmarriages, and produced more wealth than others athome but left few privileges to their sons. By the firsthalf of the 20th century, those at the top held namesknown throughout Enga and had widespread influence,several wives, servants, and control over the vastamounts of wealth flowing in exchange networks. Theethos of equality had been eroded to the point whereleadership was inherited in the context of the Great Warsand the sons of Tee managers stood a much greaterchance than their peers of “replacing” their fathers (seealso Strathern 1971:208–12).

While the aspects of competition and cooperation thatdid change made a difference, two that did not changemay have made all the difference in the course of Engahistory. The first was that equal access to the reproduc-tion of relations with the spirit world was guarded as afundamental right of all group members and never be-came an arena for competition. For many of the smallercults, there were no ritual experts—older men of expe-rience jointly directed proceedings. For larger cults, par-ticularly those of western Enga, there was a strict sep-aration of sacred and secular power. Ritual experts fromwithin the group were classified as eccentric, fearsomespecialists and noncompetitors in secular affairs. Theirauthority was further curbed by relegating them to spe-cific aspects of cult performance and summoning ritualexperts from other groups, even different linguisticgroups, to co-preside over ceremonies. Conversely, man-agers of wealth were barred from the role of ritual expertby the stigma of eccentricity and by a wandering lifestylethat precluded building a power base at home. All fam-ilies of a clan were, in principle, equal sponsors of cults.The enterprising could manage ritual life only indirectlyby supporting the import or export of certain cults, par-ticipating heavily in the organization of cult perform-ances, or inviting desired external ritual experts fromelsewhere. Thus managers could never take hold of theforces considered responsible for the reproduction of fer-tility and prosperity.

The second aspect that did not change concerned thenature of competition—that the road to success was oneof distribution, not retention and accumulation.25 To winwas to furnish benefits for group members or manage

25. Some pastoralists in volatile social and natural environmentshold both an egalitarian ethos and a contrasting emphasis on ac-cumulation (Salzman 1999). The egalitarian ethos among men mayfacilitate stock-exchange partnerships which secure families whomove rapidly from riches to rags in the event of raiding, drought,or disease (Bollig 1998).


wealth in such as way as to assemble as much as possibleat one place and one point in time for distribution. Dis-tribution was investment, not a giveaway; expected re-turns ensured financial clout for the future. Values op-posing accumulation were instilled at the onset ofadulthood: a prospective groom should have some pigsin his house for bridewealth but not so many as to signalselfishness and poor prospects as a future exchange part-ner. Consequently, throughout the course of Enga historyno material goods were accumulated, nor were any cat-egorized as “inalienable possessions” representing per-son and power (Weiner 1992). Accumulation of wealthwas constrained by coalitions of clanspeople as well asthose composed of affinal and maternal kin. The formerconceded prestige gained in exchange only for assistancein payments which gave them equal life chances—bridewealth, child growth payments, funerary presta-tions, and war reparations. The latter, which providedessential support from outside the clan, demanded thatsurplus wealth be channeled into kinship dues. With suc-cess defined in terms of management and redistribution,men had little to pass on to their sons other than familyname, information, and social ties.

Old and New Institutions Juxtaposed

Throughout Enga history new institutions were con-structed or imported and added to the cultural repertoireto coexist with former ones. Enga history might be de-scribed as additive. Most Enga narrators find points ofarticulation between the old and new but do not expecta coherent cultural repertoire (Barth 1981:49; Rodseth1998). New institutions allowed people to pursue op-portunities with reduced transaction costs; old onesbased on egalitarian principles continued to reduce trans-action costs in everyday social and economic exchange.As long as former institutions persisted, the enterprisingdid not have to renege on traditional roles and obligationsin order to engage in new ones. The simultaneous op-eration of both the old and the new provided continuityand security at the local level that lowered the risksassociated with experimentation. When the new faltered,people fell back on the old, allowing the society to cyclebetween different phases of complexity (David andSterner 1999, Leach 1954). An interesting parallel caseof the juxtaposition of institutions can be found in thework of Tuzin (1976, 1997, 2001) on the Ilahita Arapesh.In the last quarter of the 19th century, the village ofIlahita adopted the Abelam Tambaran cult in responseto the need to maintain village cohesion in the face ofAbelam military advancement. The Tambaran becamean overarching hierarchically organized institution thatregulated social life and social cohesion on principles ofdual organization. In Tuzin’s (2001:127) words, it “re-lieved, but was also a product of, the stresses engenderedby egalitarianism under conditions where disputantscould not longer go their own ways.” The Tambaran in-troduced values dramatically opposed to former egali-tarian ones, such as degradation of women, but these

were subscribed to in the ritual setting only (see alsoHarrison 1985). In secular life, the former egalitarianethos persisted, and so with the demise of the Tambaranpeople reverted to their former ethos and went their ownways in a rapidly changing world (Tuzin 1997).

The growing popularity of and participation in newinstitutions introduced dimensions to change that wereout of the hands of individual agents and with whichthey strove to keep abreast. For example, the circulationof goods in the Tee cycle eclipsed the trade in centralareas but made it more profitable at the margins fromwhere valuables were imported to fuel exchange cycles,putting some traders out of business (Mangi 1988, Meg-gitt 1956). Bridewealth, child growth payments, funeraryprestations, and compensation to allies became greatlyinflated, as they were used to channel wealth into theTee cycle and were fueled by wealth flowing out of it.Like it or not, everybody had to step up production. Overtime the Great Wars drew so many participants that theirorganization eventually defeated Great War leaders.

The upshot of preserving older institutions based onegalitarian ideals side by side with newer ones ratherthan replacing them was that older exchanges provideda ladder on which enterprising men could climb to chal-lenge those at the top. The valuing of the pig, a goodthat could be produced locally by all households (Le-monnier 1996), further aggravated competition. By thetime of first contact with Europeans, the major exchangenetworks of Enga were headed for a fall because of theiruncontained growth and popularity. The Great Wars col-lapsed one by one as they became unmanageable; thelast was fought in 1939, and its networks were subsumedby the Tee cycle. The Tee cycle continued to expand andthrive for some decades under the Pax Britannica andwith the injection of new wealth brought by Europeans.It foundered in the 1970s and has not been performedsince, as influential men have turned their sights towardprovincial and national elections. Today smaller ex-changes such as bridewealth, child growth payments, fu-nerary exchanges, and war reparations fill the gap left bythe Tee cycle. Older men who walked from one end ofEnga to the other to organize the Tee cycle between the1930s and the 1960s feel that the Tee cycle might even-tually have fragmented without European interference.They argue that the Tee cycle had simply grown too largeand competitive for managers to control the informationessential to its organization and to persuade such a largefollowing to comply with their plans.

Broader Implications

Returning to the question of structure and agency, cer-tainly individual agency left its mark in the testimoniesof Enga history. However, there is little evidence thatthe initial steps to the institutionalization of hierarchicalinequality were the products of influential agents’ ap-propriating the resources of fellow group members orthat they sought to do so. Individual success was tooheavily embedded in group ideals and group welfare, and


egalitarian coalitions were too strong. Where agentsmade their biggest gains was by helping develop or im-port new institutions to tap hitherto undeveloped realmsof the economy and to alter norms and ideals. New in-stitutions arose not as a by-product of aggrandizementbut when individuals, usually clan leaders, recognizedthe potential in spontaneous events, discussed thesewith fellow clanspeople, and attempted to frame theminto more formal institutions to address group problems.The innovations promoted were ones that leaders feltcould be played to their own advantage; the innovationsthat stuck were those that worked for the individual andthe group. Additional selection pressures favoring newinstitutions arose with perturbations to the system, lend-ing some support to adaptationist approaches. A finalforce of change that cannot be attributed to the directaction of individual agents brought unintended conse-quences—the juxtaposing of new and old institutionsand their interactive effect.

But the main thrust of my argument concerns thestructure of egalitarian societies. As the Enga case illus-trates, egalitarianism is not the product of simplicity; itsstructures may be as varied and complex as hierarchicalstructures of power. Egalitarian structures have impor-tant consequences for reducing the high transactioncosts of social and economic exchange and are main-tained by social coalitions within a society. All knownegalitarian societies are partitioned by socially defineddistinctions drawn along the lines of age, gender, ability,or kinship roles; equal rights to status positions and re-sources within these partitions may be maintained bydifferent social coalitions. The strength and configura-tion of these coalitions, together with ideologies of whatconstitutes a transgression of the norms of equality, pro-duce a wide range of variation in so-called egalitariansocieties as well as in pathways to inequality. In closingI would like to briefly explore such variation by com-paring Enga with other societies, particularly African so-cieties for which material from ethnography, oral history,archaeology, and historical or comparative linguistics isavailable.

For Enga it is possible to identify a number of featuresof egalitarian ethos and egalitarian coalitions which in-fluenced the options of the enterprising. Very importantin this context is that the Enga ethos did not excludecompetition; rather, all men were encouraged to striveto do well, and the successful were rewarded with pres-tige if their efforts benefited the group. This is in sharpcontrast to the situation of foragers in Africa such as theSan or the Hadza, where competition is avoided in child-hood by the absence of competitive games (Konner 1972,Marshall 1976, Sbrezny 1976) and suppressed in adult-hood by both cultural institutions and leveling action(Lee 1993, Marshall 1976). When the ethos of egalitari-anism nips competition in the bud, there are formidablebarriers to the emergence of leadership and institution-alized social inequalities.

For Enga, three axes of egalitarianism and their accom-panying coalitions were prominent. The first was thepotential equality of all clansmen that guaranteed equal

access to land, labor, and exchange relationships and clansupport in procuring spouses for all men. Under theseconditions the most gifted young men could become“emergent big-men” (Strathern 1982) shortly after mar-riage. Such equality of access to the means of productionand reproduction inhibited the exploitation of the laborof juniors in the process of competition for wives, whatIllife (1995:95) calls “one of the most dynamic and en-during forces in African history.” Moreover, all maturemen held equal rights in the reproduction of relationswith the ancestors as soon as their households couldproduce pigs for ancestral cults. Through ancestral cultsthe ethos of social equality that cemented groups waspreserved over generations despite the disruptive forces.Consequently, the rise of leaders who could manage bothmeaning and material wealth and link their success tosupernatural power was impeded.26 Such privileged ac-cess to the spirit world has been proposed to be a keyfactor in the emergence of inequality (Asombang 1999;David and Sterner 1999; Godelier 1978, 1980; McIntosh1999; Netting 1972; Ploeg 2001; Schoenbrun 1999;Southall 1999; Robertshaw 1999; Vansina 1990, 1999),even in the most fiercely egalitarian societies (Kinahan1991, 1999).

A second powerful axis of equality was maintainedwith exchange partners outside the clan, usually kin,who were maternal or affinal relatives. Such equality,based on lifelong two-way exchanges of wealth, fosteredcooperation and trust with relatives outside the groupby removing competition and exploitation from the pic-ture. External relations were regarded as fragile strandsof a spider web, for they afforded economic advantagethat could not be attained through home production.Moreover, they provided alternative residences in timesof hardship and potential hosts for war refugees. Engamanagers took full advantage of external relationshipsto secure “wealth in social ties,” the foundation for in-equality. However, the very equality that facilitated themaintenance of such broad ties precluded centralizinglabor and building “wealth in people” (Guyer 1995,Guyer and Belinga 1995, Miers and Kopytoff 1977). Forexample, had bridewealth been a one-time payment, am-bitious men would have been able to convert “wealth inpigs” to “wealth in people” through high levels of po-lygyny (Illife 1995; Richards 1950; Vansina 1990:227;Uchendu 1965). But as it was, affinal kin insisted thattheir daughters receive as much land, labor, and wealthfor lifelong exchanges from their husband’s kin as wouldwomen in monogamous marriages. Consequently, priorto the colonial period, only the most gifted men couldsupport two or three wives. Moreover, the principle of

26. A salient example of the separation between the sacred and thesecular comes from the life history of Yakani Lambu, one of Enga’smost powerful Tee managers from 1930 to 1960. Prior to a Teecycle, sacred vegetation on the Yakani ancestral site was felled bya rival in an attempt to bring the wrath of the ancestors upon Lambuand the Yakani clan. Upon hearing the news, Lambu went with hismen to inspect the damage and found blood dripping from the de-filed tree. His response was a rather unheroic: “Let’s get out ofhere!”


equality of affines held for new immigrants. Immigrantswere given land by the host lineage on the basis of affinalties (Wohlt 1978) with the assurance that their childrenwould become full-fledged clan members. Hosts hopedfor support from their relatives but in the face of equalitycould not establish relationships such as “the primacyof the first comer” so critical to the formation of internalgroup hierarchy in Central African societies (Kopytoff1999:89).

Very significant in relations of equality between clans-men and with affines was the fact that coalitions to en-force equality were composed largely of men. Womenwho wanted to exert their rights had to do so indirectlyby influencing their husbands, turning to their respectivekinsmen for support, or resorting to violent protest (M.Strathern 1972, Kyakas and Wiessner 1992). Women canbe powerful watchdogs of inequality (Boehm 1999a), andin societies where men and women have roughly equalroles in enforcement inequalities are likely to have amuch more difficult time taking root. Among the !Kung(Ju/’hoansi) of today, it is women rather than men whoare making the most significant efforts to maintain net-works of exchange (hxaro) and thereby ensuring the re-distribution of wealth in the face of unequal access towealth from male wage labor (Wiessner 2000). In thefascinating Iroquois case presented by Trigger (1990), itappears that the equality of women and their role inenforcing social norms together with a noncompetitiveethos may have led to quite a different complex politicalstructure from that found among the otherwise some-what similar Enga.

A third powerful constellation of equality existed inthe segmentary lineage system to maintain egalitarianrelations among parallel social units. Whether large orsmall, clans were equal to all other clans in a tribe, sub-clans to other subclans in a clan, and so on. If their au-tonomy was challenged, allies often offered support.Equality of social units facilitated cooperation of brothergroups in larger enterprises; it was defended to the veryend. When wars erupted between parallel social units,the defeated either conceded a parcel of land or weredisplaced to reestablish themselves in a new territory ordisbanded but never conceded to being subordinated toor subsumed by the victor’s clan. These dynamics,amongst others, inhibited the centralization of power(Lederman 1986, Roscoe 1993, Spencer 1990, Wright1977) or the formation of a vertical hierarchy of socialunits (Friedman and Rowlands 1978). Continual jock-eying for wealth and influence on the part of parallelclans in the segmentary lineage system produced a pat-tern of rapid, uniform, and widespread land clearancethat would be very distinct from the patterns of land useproduced by centralization.

These are but a few examples of how diverse ideologiesand coalitions within egalitarian societies, played outunder certain environmental conditions, will producevery different obstacles to the emergence of institution-alized inequality setting egalitarian societies off on tra-jectories that depart from what David and Sterner (1999:99) have called the “state-jacket sequence” of

neoevolutionary theory for political evolution (Ehren-reich, Crumley, and Levy 1995; McIntosh 1999; Paynter1989; Vansina 1990, 1999; Yoffee 1993). Exploring egal-itarian structures as complex institutions that arose his-torically to reduce the transaction costs of exchangemakes it possible to depart from neoevolutionary modelswithout abandoning a more encompassing theoreticalframework. By facilitating intercultural comparison, thisframework should increase our understanding of the dif-ferent courses taken by the enterprising and the diverseforms of social complexity emerging from the process.

Despite the restrictions that egalitarian coalitionsplaced on developments in Enga society, by first contactwith Europeans Enga had taken important steps towardinstitutionalized inequality. A booming surplus econ-omy had been generated, norms governing competitionhad been unleashed, the “elite” had a strong informationadvantage, and some families had much greater “wealthin social ties” than others. Precedents for inequality hadbeen set in ideology and practical action. The potentialequality of clansmen and affines was still a widely heldethos, but the real differences were great. Although thelarge exchange networks were foundering by the time offirst contact, it is unlikely that their collapse would havebeen the end of the story. Up until contact, populationgrowth had provided more opportunities than obstacles,but several decades down the road pressure on landwould begin to be felt. The independence, equality, andautonomy of social units from clans to households de-pended heavily on the availability of land. With limitson land, the options of social units to maintain auton-omy might have been severely compromised (David andSterner 1999). Alternatively, predictions from an influ-ential Huli cult to the southwest (Ballard 1995, Frankel1986, Wiessner and Tumu 2001), grounded in cosmolog-ical beliefs unfamiliar to central and eastern Enga, werespreading rumors that the world would end in a few gen-erations. Had managers taken the portending doom froma foreign cult into their hands, they might have secureda more direct line to the supernatural. Circumstance hadlong provided Enga with opportunities to build new in-stitutions. Managers in future generations would havethese new ideologies and institutions as starting pointsfrom which to go farther.

Comments

shankar aswaniDepartment of Anthropology, University of California,Santa Barbara, Calif. 93106, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 1 xi 01

In this interesting and timely paper, Wiessner argues thategalitarian institutions in “small-scale” societies are de-signed to lower the transaction costs of making and keep-ing agreements in the exchange of goods and servicesamong political players. She disputes North’s (1990) as-


sertion that transaction costs are lower in traditionalsocieties, suggesting that they are in fact high becauseof the uncertainties created by exchanges among closekin. I disagree. Transaction costs are generally low whencommunities have (1) “stability of relations,” (2) “mul-tiplex relations,” or repeated interactions across varioussocial and economic spheres, (3) “direct relations” (e.g.,without state intervention) and, most important, (4)“shared beliefs and preferences” (Taylor and Singleton1993:199). Case studies from around the world show thatnepotism and kin-related altruism via resource pooling,sharing, and cooperative territorial behavior are impor-tant among close kin who share high coefficients of re-latedness and live near each other (e.g., Allen 1998,Gurven et al. 2001). Therefore, it is likely that com-munities sharing linguistic, cultural, social, and kinshipaffinities can more effectively reduce the negotiation,monitoring, and enforcement costs of exchange agree-ments than communities whose members are more so-cially and spatially dispersed and less likely to be soci-oculturally homogeneous.

Because transaction costs are low in small-scale so-cieties, it seems unlikely that egalitarian institutionswould emerge to lower them. In fact, the contrary couldbe argued. An effective response to collective-actionproblems such as those outlined by Wiessner requirescooperation among political players and the develop-ment of coercive measures to punish potential free riders.Political players may allow free riding when resourcesare abundant or not perceived as scarce, but increasingenvironmental demands caused by changes in consump-tion and population variables—such as the changes re-corded by oral history and archaeology for a number ofHighland groups prior to European contact and well be-fore the Great Wars and Tee cycles emerged—would en-courage the development of coercive measures to curtailit. The hegemonic rise of “aggrandizers” and their fol-lowers and the concomitant establishment of sociopo-litical hierarchies best achieve this. Thus, the loweringof transaction costs would best be accomplished undera hierarchical political system. Why, then, would com-plex and costly egalitarian institutions arise among theEnga? Alternative hypotheses to explain the existence ofegalitarian institutions in pre-European contact timesare necessary.

Another problem is that, because oral accounts coveronly a short period of Enga history, it is hard to determinewhat came before the period covered by Wiessner with-out archaeological evidence. Political hierarchies and in-stitutionalized inequality could have developed in theregion well before the “Great Wars” and the institution-alization of the Tee cycle. Highland Papua New Guineaarchaeology suggests that agriculture developed in theregion around 9,000 b.p. and that the consequences ofagricultural expansion included a population explosionand radical shifts in settlement patterns well before thesweet-potato revolution (e.g., Bayliss-Smith and Golson1992). Large populations and multifarious economic andpolitical opportunities for achieving status and powerwould have scrambled assurances of cooperation among

different social players, thus encouraging the rise of po-litical hierarchies. The Enga egalitarian ethos encoun-tered by ethnographers may have lingered in a contextin which the occurrence of formal hierarchical institu-tions or parallel semiegalitarian ones followed a cyclicalprocess, their rise and decline synchronous with the ever-rearranging political landscape and the social, historical,and economic context of the times. Studies of the ar-chaeology and oral history of New Georgia suggest thatnot only was the rise of institutionalized hierarchiesamong the most conspicuous responses to changes inpatterns of settlement and demographic parameters (e.g.,Aswani 2000, Sheppard, Walter, and Nagaoka 2000) butalso their degree of formalization varied across space andtime and was cyclical in nature.

The ethnohistory of this paper is rich and interesting.Readers may criticize Wiessner for using only ethno-history to reconstruct the Enga’s past, pointing to theimportance (and pliability) of contemporary narrativesin creating shared social identities or in supportingclaims to political legitimacy and autonomy from co-lonial and postcolonial orders. My problem, however, isnot with Wiessner’s use of ethnohistory as history or heruse of Enga genealogy to estimate the chronological se-quence of events. Rather, I would criticize her failure todraw upon archaeological evidence (or even mention it)to complement the oral history she employs. The richliterature on Highland Papua New Guinea archaeologycould help her substantiate her claims. This void is aweakness in her analysis and leaves her conclusions opento question.

chris ballardPacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacificand Asian Studies, Australian National University,Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia ([email protected]). 28 xi 01

Wiessner’s collaborative research project with her Engacolleagues Akii Tumu, Alome Kyakas, and Nitze Pupuhas provided us with one of the first detailed accountsof historical transformations in a New Guinea Highlandssociety. This represents a considerable advance on pre-vious strategies, which sought to reconstruct the past byjuxtaposing contrasting social formations from ethno-graphic observations amongst different societies. The re-sulting trajectories for social evolution tended to betraythe theoretical proclivities or narrowly regional perspec-tives of their authors rather than offer any insight intoactual processes of transformation from one putative for-mation to the next. Oral history has been a sadly ne-glected avenue of research in the Highlands, and this isall the more regrettable because so many older Highlandswomen and men have experienced the transition fromautonomous communities to colonial rule and then toindependence within the span of a single lifetime.

The thumbnail account of Enga oral history offeredhere only hints at the impressive and convincing detailof this team’s major monograph (Wiessner and Tumu


1998), where the sheer weight of multiple strands of ev-idence negates at least some of the scepticism previouslydirected at attempts to reconstruct the precontact his-tory of oral cultures. Perhaps the most salutary lessonof this project for anthropologists has been the demon-stration of the evanescent quality of the “institutions”so commonly described in systemic and synchronicterms in regional ethnographies. The Enga tee exchangesare a case in point, as the oral histories now suggest thatno two tee exchange cycles were alike. Rather, the tee,along with most other “institutions,” experienced con-tinuous transformation as new materials, ideas, and net-works of exchange were brought into its orbit.

Perhaps it is the subtlety of her oral historical workthat raises some doubt about the value of Wiessner’schoice of theoretical framework in this paper, howeveradmirable her intention to engage with wider debates onpolitical transformation. The focus on institutions,transaction costs, and the role of individual agents mayreflect Wiessner’s parallel research project among !KungSan communities but is curiously at odds with the latentcritique of “institution”-based ethnography contained inthe Enga oral histories. Certainly, the “road to inequal-ity” which Wiessner describes for Enga is not so clear-cut amongst their neighbours the Huli, on the south-western margins of Enga territory.

Huli oral history describes a pre–sweet-potato systemof hereditary leadership culminating, amongst thoseclans that owned key ritual sites, in closely knit andheavily intermarried families of ritual experts whowielded remarkable power over the entire Huli languagecommunity and even beyond the boundaries of Huli ter-ritory (Strathern [1993] signals the former importance ofritual leadership for the Highlands region more gener-ally). The past two to three centuries of Huli history,during which there was an explosion in human and pignumbers similar to that described here for the Enga, wit-nessed a gradual “democratization” of leadership roles.Ceremonies were increasingly sponsored and ministeredby a much wider range of players, who assumed a be-wildering array of minor ceremonial offices in ritualssuch as the tege. Similarly, the high degree of controlover land and resources formerly exercised by hereditaryclan and subclan leaders appears to have waned as in-dividuals, irrespective of their descent status, establishedclaims to land founded primarily on the principle of la-bour investment and on their individual managerial ca-pacity to marshal that labour. Crucially, the situation ofincreasing monopolization by leaders of flows of infor-mation that Wiessner describes for post–sweet-potatoEnga society was also reversed amongst Huli as ritualknowledge, along with the capacity to monopolize re-gional networks of trade in material items such as saltand stone axe blades, ceased to be the preserve of thehereditary ritual families (Ballard 1994). One might evencharacterize this historical trend in Huli leadership as ashift from hierarchy to heterarchy, in a direction pre-cisely opposite to that indicated for the Enga byWiessner.

This is not to say that forms of “inequality” similar

to those amongst Enga have not developed in post–sweet-potato Huli society, which has seen the emergence of“rich men” (agali homogo) and occasionally rich women(wali homogo) as the pre-eminent brokers of social trans-actions. Yet “inequality” in Huli society has more oftentaken the form of competition between social groupswithin which a strongly egalitarian ethos guarantees adegree of solidarity, at least with respect to particularprojects such as wars or major trading or gardening ven-tures. The Enga may not represent land shortage as aserious problem and rarely identify land as a proximatecause for wars, but oral histories of the Enga and Hulialike are replete with serial displacements of clans fromtheir territories. It is on this larger scale of intergroupcompetition that an analysis of “inequality” in the NewGuinea highlands might more productively be focused.

christopher boehm1047 A San Acacio, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501, U.S.A.([email protected]). 1 xii 01

This article sets a new standard for the ethnohistoricaltreatment of political and economic processes in non-literate egalitarian societies, and it addresses one of thegreat mysteries in political anthropology: How did egal-itarian bands or (more probably) tribes evolve into chief-doms with stratification and stable hierarchies? We lacka full, ethnographically documented processual se-quence, but in the middle—between egalitarian societiesand chiefdoms with hereditary leadership—lies a fasci-nating intermediate-seeming type, the great-man or big-man society. Wiessner has provided us with a richly de-tailed case history that shows how such a society canchange, before contact, toward more hierarchy.

Normally archaeologists deal in environmental anddemographic factors and grave goods provide a rough in-dex to social stratification, but recently the dispositionof power has become a focus (Earle 1977; see also Boehm1999b) and social and economic organization are obvi-ously relevant. Wiessner emphasizes all of these varia-bles, along with religion and secular ideology. The un-derlying question is, How do we get from a vigilantlyegalitarian group, one which sharply curbs individual po-litical ascendancy, to a group which tolerates and appre-ciates strong leaders and, by making leadership heredi-tary, creates the basis for hierarchy among family lines?Tikopia (Firth 1936) can be taken as an instance in whichegalitarian society has definitively transformed itselfinto a hierarchical society, and the Enga have become aweak chiefdom by the end of Wiessner’s story. But sheoffers us some importance clues about how things mighthave started in this direction.

Her suggestive processual analysis is both detailed andwell grounded ethnographically, but I have a concernabout her views on whether egalitarianism came downfrom the Upper Paleolithic. This political approach in-volves the curbing of those who are prone to self-ag-grandizement, and this is not mainly a matter of eco-nomic accumulation or of possession of raw power.


There is a phobia about one individual’s treating anotherdominantly, as an essential nonequal, and I believe it tobe ancient. Wiessner does not agree about the equiva-lence of today’s mobile foragers with yesterday’s, but Ibelieve that the debate over this has been oversimplified.We know now that the Upper Paleolithic was accom-panied by a great deal of environmental fluctuation. Mo-bile hunter-gatherers were variegated 40,000 years agojust as they are today, and if in the face of all this vari-egation we can find universal features or strong centraltendencies today, it makes sense that they could berather confidently projected back into the Upper Paleo-lithic (see Boehm 1999a, 2000).

On this basis, some baseline features of past egalitar-ianism would include an egalitarian ethos, an intentionto prevent interpersonal domination at least among adultmales of a band, cooperative division of favored largegame, and the use of social sanctions by group membersto prevent dominators or would-be dominators fromgaining control of their groups over the long term. Goingwith this is a decision process based on group consensus,and much of this syndrome—the political side of it butnot the hunting or nomadic side—seems to have contin-ued after domestication in very much the same formamong tribal people.

What is interesting about big-man societies is that thesame ethos can be flexibly applied to men who controlgreat wealth, albeit ephemerally. One must keep inmind, as Wiessner and other students of New Guineatribal life have made clear, that such control is gainedin a cultural context of intergroup competition and thata big-man’s prestigeful displays of wealth bring prestigeto the entire group. Thus, individualistic self-aggran-dizement is accepted because of the common benefits itbrings. There is still a vigilant group that is interestedin the essential political parity of males, as is evidencedby the fact that big-men who become abusive are exe-cuted (Boehm 1993).

Much more could be said, for this article is full ofriches. The case made for transaction costs is interesting,and this adds an important variable to the search for theorigins of hierarchy. In addition, the data are excellentand are published elsewhere in detail. This effort takesus one step closer to developing sounder hypothesesabout how humans began to centralize everything, for itsuggests a way in which the processes that led to stateformation could have gotten started.

john e . clarkDepartment of Anthropology, Brigham YoungUniversity, Provo, Utah 84602, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 21 xi 01

The most appropriate response to Wiessner’s superb es-say should be to bend the knee and retire in silence—butthis would defy all academic licensing requirements. Asthe only extant description for all the world’s culturesof a pristine development from egalitarian to rank societytaken from the narratives of the participants themselves

rather than mythology, her article deserves to becomean instant classic. That it is theoretically and analyti-cally sophisticated is an added joy. Recovery of oral his-tories for the breadth and depth of Enga territories andtheir potato and piglet politics allows for a reconstruc-tion of institutional changes and their linkages to mo-tivated individual and group actions and the creation ofnew social values both for objects and for persons. Wies-sner’s analysis also demonstrates the utility of new in-stitutional economics (Ensminger 1992, North 1990) the-ory and analytical categories and procedures; her analysisof egalitarian societies also fills a void in this theory’sconceptualizations of this stage of societal development(cf. North 1990).

Most current explanations for the origins of social in-equalities and privilege have failed to free themselvesfrom the centuries of ironic and imaginative speculationthat now shroud this issue. Wiessner sheds this philo-sophical dead weight by addressing the irony of “egali-tarianism,” perhaps the most infamous malapropism inanthropology. The word conveys the impression that so-cieties so designated operate on principles of equalityrather than the inequalities rampant in all the rest. Allsocieties, however, are riven with inequalities of varioussorts, and society and family life would be impossiblewithout them. Egalitarian societies are those that investsubstantial resources and talk in pretending that in-equalities are ephemeral and inconsequential. As Wiess-ner demonstrates here and elsewhere (1996, 2001), notall egalitarian societies are created equal, and their dif-ferences are structurally significant. Egalitarian societiesare neither simple nor the same; each requires tremen-dous energetic resources to maintain the social conven-tion that each member be accorded equal treatment andaccess to critical resources. Relying on the concepts ofthe new institutional economics, Wiessner asserts thategalitarian institutions exist to lower transaction costsin exchange and are a measure of the efficiency and com-plexity of these societies. The theory has further ironicimplications for her analysis and for current conceptionsof the origins of ascriptive inequalities.

The knee-jerk equation of egalitarianism with sim-plicity derives from Enlightenment speculations con-cerning human nature and man in the original State ofNature. As mental constructs, pristine man and savagesociety were imaginary inversions and negations of civ-ilized existence, and these images served as a mirror forgauging civilization’s comparative progress. The savagein the mirror, however, has always been a false reflectionof a negated present. Egalitarian societies are not civi-lized societies stripped of all accessories; rather, they areviable social organizations with deep histories and pre-scribed practices of group cooperation in which individ-ual agents act to reproduce traditional ways of life. Atthe level of agents and the prerequisites of personhood,all societies have interactional asymmetries and in-equalities, and all are equally complex. The notion of“complexity” in anthropology makes sense only in mak-ing typological distinctions of scale and hierarchies ofdecision making, not with regard to the number of in-


teractions or relationships among constituent agents orgroups in a society. From the perspective of New Insti-tutional Economics, societies designated as “complex”represent dramatic simplifications over their egalitarianpredecessors. The chaotic complexity of single-order sys-tems is a mathematical property of the potential numberof relationships among individual members, which willincrease by an additional factorial for each new member.With social systems based on ascriptive leadership andhierarchy, however, higher-order institutions for gath-ering and processing information and for enforcing in-formal and formal rules come into play. Hierarchical or-ganization and decision making greatly reduce thetransaction costs of social intercourse for the multitudeand result in a rationalized, efficient system. As it turnsout, complex societies are those that promote simplicityand simplifying institutions (see Yoffee 2001). Wiessnermakes a strong case for the efficiencies of egalitarianinstitutions and the costs involved in maintaining them.The power of her analysis would be enhanced were sheto do the same for the new Enga institutions that pro-moted inequalities.

Wiessner objects to most of the current models for theorigins of social complexity on good theoretical grounds,and her detailed analyses of the Enga add weight to herviews. Her historical reconstruction of the principalagents, their motivations, and the key institutions pro-vides a compelling method for future analyses. The basicmessage is that all systems have a significant historywhich cannot be ignored. One should expect, therefore,that individual cases around the globe of the transitionfrom egalitarian to rank societies will vary in significantways from the one she presents. Rather than create imag-ined predecessors, our interpretive challenge will be todeal with the complexity of institutions, practices, be-liefs, and incentives for real egalitarian societies andtheir changes through time. Achievement and social es-teem from one’s fellows are the road to renown, and fromthere nepotism is the road to rank and the true begin-nings of social simplicity. As Wiessner’s work demon-strates, an excellent way to evaluate these changes isthrough an analysis that emphasizes property, institu-tions, ideologies, agency, and the structure of incentives.

brian haydenArchaeology Department, Simon Fraser University,Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6. 19 xi 01

Wiessner’s analysis of the origins of inequality in NewGuinea is fascinating and provocative. I agree that hi-erarchy is deeply rooted in human behavior. I also agreethat examining transaction costs may be a useful way ofunderstanding social institutions, although Wiessner’sdiscussion of this is largely programmatic and lacks anyreal detailed application in her ethnographic cases. I alsoagree that aggrandizers must initially persuade othercommunity members to support schemes that seeminglywill benefit everyone and have argued that this leads tobroadly based, heterarchical social structures used to cre-

ate inequality (Hayden 1995; 1997:115; 2001:247–48).However, that aggrandizers must pretend to treat ev-eryone equally does not mean (contra Wiessner) that theywere not the main agents of the emergence of new in-stitutions which clearly benefited them and led tosocioeconomic inequalities. As Wiessner herself notes,“the enterprising did gain some economic advantage byinterpreting rules to their advantage.” This is a key issue,and she seems to be contradicting herself on it. Indeed,it is strange to find inequality portrayed as an inherentcharacteristic of humans but also as a product of com-munitarian dynamics in which self-interested agentsplay little or no role. Wiessner’s two examples of insti-tutional change resulting from spontaneous events arehardly convincing arguments for aggrandizers’ not beingessential elements in any or even most institutionalchanges. Given the arguments about the differentialcosts of the Great Wars, Wiessner indicates that thesewould probably have been abandoned eventually in anycase, and spontaneous ritual female competition overmen seems an almost insignificant part of a muchbroader institutional change (the adoption of bachelorcults). While I agree that egalitarian forces are major hur-dles in attempts to create socioeconomic power, Wiess-ner goes too far in negating the role of aggrandizers. In-itially everyone participating in the various schemes pro-moted by aggrandizers must perhaps be treated equally,but for such schemes to have significant effects universalparticipation is not required. Wiessner notes that the Teewas initially endorsed by only a handful of people. Suchdifferential participation entails inequalities in the so-ciety at large, especially where participants obtainadvantages.

By “inequality” Wiessner seems to mean “institution-alized inequality” such as is found in chiefdoms. In re-ality, major inequalities exist well before the chiefdomlevel of complexity. She also defines “equality” in Fried’s(1960) terms of adequate availability of prestige positionsand equal access to resources (at least in theory). Thiscontrasts significantly with the more archaeological def-initions that focus not on the availability of prestige po-sitions, egalitarian ethoses, or lip service to egalitarianideals but on behavior and the ownership and distribu-tion of prestige goods and/or debts within a society.While Wiessner portrays Enga society as egalitarian (atleast within cooperating kin groups), there is and wasprivate (individual or family) use of land, private own-ership of products, private raising of domestic animals(representing surplus), differential access to exotic goods(shells, feathers, axes), competition over economic re-sources, and warfare for access to goods, land, wives, andprestige. None of these are common in real egalitariansocieties. One must also wonder to what extent thesparse accounts of greater “egalitarianism” in remotetimes have suffered in transmittal or been remodeled tosuit utopian or other political agendas.

The traits listed above are aspects of what I and othershave called transegalitarian societies. In the initialstages, transegalitarian societies are characterized by lipservice to egalitarian ethics and public behavior to ob-


scure real inequalities in power and wealth. Ambitiousindividuals lure their supporters into schemes that mustultimately be rewarding for supporters at least some ofthe time. Thus, groups maintain egalitarian cooperativeinternal relations and heterarchical rather than hierar-chical sociopolitical structures. Not all kinship heads areaggrandizers, but those who are create major changes inthe direction of inegalitarian institutions. Ultimately, ofcourse, these institutions do benefit productive clans andhouseholds that adopt them, but they also create in-equalities between groups and managerial positions thatmake it possible for aggrandizers to obtain more wives,more debts, and more influence. These institutions aredevised to cater in some way to aggrandizer self-interests(albeit channeled through a group of supporters).

While Wiessner uses traditional anthropological no-tions of egalitarianism to claim that there are many va-rieties of egalitarian societies, I think it is clear that Engasociety is a transegalitarian one. This may boil down toa matter of semantics, for we seem to be making some-what similar distinctions, but if Enga do not qualify asa transegalitarian society one wonders if any societywould. Wiessner suggests that “Enga-type egalitarian”societies may have characterized much of the Paleo-lithic, but, given the lower resource-extractive potentialdue to the simpler technology of the past (as well as thelack of prestige objects or any indication of wealth com-petition before the Upper Paleolithic), it seems that theCentral Australian egalitarian model is a much moreappropriate baseline. The idea of various structurally dif-ferent types of egalitarian societies is an intriguing one,especially in explaining short-term historical changes,and I would like to see it developed further. In the longrun, however, it has yet to be demonstrated that suchdetails of history matter, especially given cases like theEnga, where, as Wiessner demonstrates, egalitarian con-straints were eventually almost totally circumvented af-ter the introduction of the sweet potato and powerfulaggrandizers with chiefly characteristics did emerge.

j urg helblingEthnologisches Seminar, Universitat Zurich,Freiensteinstrasse 5, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland([email protected]). 21 xi 01

Wiessner shows us again how rewarding historical re-constructions in societies without a written history canbe. Her reference to the model of new institutional ec-onomics demonstrates that this model helps to elucidatenot only common-property management but also evo-lutionary processes of political change, but she does notexhaust its explanatory potential. She refers to institu-tions, ideology, and actors, but local groups are organi-zations with their own power and status structure,groups of individuals united to pursue common interestsmore successfully under given institutional conditionsor to change those institutional conditions (Ensminger1992:6). All organizations have to solve the problem ofcollective goods. The emergence of Tee exchange and

hierarchy within local groups can be more convincinglyexplained with the help of the concepts of organizationand collective goods.

Unoccupied land was still widely available in the 18thcentury, and population densities were low. War usuallyended with the expulsion of the defeated group, and, ac-cordingly, neighbouring groups were mostly alliedgroups. Allies were compensated for their losses andtheir support with land and meat. Trade in stone axes,salt, shells, etc., already played a certain role. The rela-tionships between men were egalitarian, although Wiess-ner reports a heterarchy of ritual experts, cassowaryhunters, warriors, and managers. As population growthand settlement densities increased, it became increas-ingly difficult to expel enemies after a war; alliances hadto be enforced by compensating allies more lavishly, andlater a postwar modus vivendi had to be found even withenemies. Tee exchange emerged not directly with in-creased competition for allies but with control of trade.It probably did not operate at lower transaction coststhan alternative exchange modalities, but it definitelymade more goods available at a given time and place. Itwas, after all, as Wiessner clearly states, a new way offinancing affinal and matrilateral payments as well ascompensating allies. Its expansion was due to the mili-tary advantage it gave the groups which adopted it; or-ganizations (local clans) were selected for the new in-stitution (Tee) by a warlike environment.

Organizations in warlike competition have to improvetheir chances of survival by forming alliances, but inrecruiting allies they incur high costs in pigs. The pigsprovided as alliance goods can be interpreted as collec-tive goods, and therefore each group has to solve theproblem of free riding in order to avoid a military dis-advantage. According to Peoples (1982), the collective-goods problem is solved in Maring society by “privati-zation”: families pay marriage gifts to their affines andare in turn supported by them in wars. Among the Enga,however, local groups are exogamous patriclans. Mostmarriages are contracted between families of adjacentpatriclans, but most wars are also between adjacentgroups. Because the Enga “marry their enemies,” a di-vergence between individual and group interestsemerges; allies cannot be recruited in the same way asamong the Maring. This collective-goods problem canonly be solved if men with power and high status takeover. Meggitt (1974) has shown that a large proportionof the Tee pigs goes to the big-man, who gives them tothe big-man of another clan to distribute. It is the pat-riclan which decides about war, peace, and alliance, andthe big-man plays a central role in the “foreign policy”of his local group. Group members with loyalty conflicts(i.e., with affinal relatives in the enemy group) cannotprevent a war but can only avoid clashing with theiraffines on the battlefield. Big-men are political entrepre-neurs with widespread regional networks and a followingof “servants” and agnates within their groups. Becausethey take care of the provision of collective goods (pigs),contribute more to the recruitment of allies, and organ-ize their compensation after a war in the interest of their


local groups, they are rewarded individually with posi-tional goods such as power and status. Although eachman maintains exchange relationships with men inother groups, the big-man makes them exchange theirpigs in accordance with the alliance politics of the clan.As Wiessner shows, egalitarian ideology (between men)remains plausible even after powerful big-men haveemerged because all men have the right to become big-men and to invest pigs in political relations. One resultof this competition between politically ambitious menis an increase in the total production of pigs as alliancegoods. Another is the selection of the most suitable manfor the job. The competition for positional goods withinthe local group is, thus, individual selection, which,however, depends on group selection by war.

That Tee exchange considerably increased the quantityof alliance goods available is corroborated by the fact thatit was widely adopted only when competition for alliesincreased. It was only when big-men (and inequalitiesbetween men) emerged that the problem of free ridingand the divergence between individual and group inter-ests was solved and thus transaction costs were reduced.Ensminger and Knight (1997) have presented a model foranalysing the complex relations between actors, insti-tutions, and organizations: (1) Self-interested actors pro-pose new institutional solutions for new problems. (2)Bargaining takes place as institutional change is con-nected with changes in the political structure of organ-izations. (3) Finally, selective advantage in the compe-tition between organizations gives the new institutionan edge.

mitsuo ichikawaGraduate School of Asian and African Area Studies,Kyoto University, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan([email protected]). 12 xi 01

Most studies on the emergence of hierarchical societiesfocus mainly on the conditions for institutional devel-opment; few have empirically shown how inequality de-veloped from an egalitarian society. Wiessner’s study isan important contribution, since it describes how insti-tutional inequality emerged from the interaction be-tween “agents” and “structure” in a particular historicaland ethnographical context. According to her, some ofthe competing individuals in the Enga society introducedand promoted, by forming group consensus and satisfy-ing group interests, institutions for exchange such as theTee cycle and thereby established themselves as leaders.While I am not in a position to discuss the validity ofher analysis in the ethnographic context of the NewGuinea Highlands, I will comment on the idea of egal-itarian societies on which her argument is based.

Wiessner’s argument has two premises: that egalitar-ian structures are not a “slate of simplicity” but “com-plex institutions which . . . have arisen to reduce thetransaction costs of exchange in small-scale societies”and that “egalitarian coalitions vary . . . in configuration,composition, scope, and nature . . . producing a wide

variety of paths to . . . inequality in different societies.”I support the first half of the first point. Anthropologistshave often characterized egalitarian societies in terms of“minimal politics” (Woodburn 1979) or the absence ofinstitutions (Ingold 1999), but this feature is often theresult of efforts to prevent the development of a hier-archical social order through institutional means thatmay be rather elaborate. African hunter-gatherers, forexample, use a variety of means to achieve egalitariansocial relationships. One of these is the frequentexchange, or lending and borrowing, of hunting tools.Since the owner of the kill is the owner of the tool withwhich the prey was immobilized, this exchange helps tospread out the ownership of kills, which would other-wise be concentrated in a few skillful hunters. The equal-ity is maintained largely by an institution of ownershipthat distinguishes the owner from the hunter who ac-tually kills the animal (Ichikawa 1991, 2001).

I am reluctant, however, to support the idea that egal-itarian institutions reduce transaction costs. While in ahominid-evolutionary context extensive food sharing (animportant aspect of egalitarianism) probably had an adap-tive value in reducing the risk of an uncertain food sup-ply, food sharing in modern egalitarian societies seemsto be motivated by other social factors, which explainswhy it persists even after they have acquired othermeans, such as storage and credit, of coping with un-certainty. Moreover, detailed studies of food sharing (Ki-tanishi 2000) show that food is also frequently sharedwith nonrelatives, on whom people have less informa-tion, thus increasing transaction costs. While the Engamay have succeeded in reducing the transaction costs ofextensive exchange networks by strengthening theirleadership, egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers doesnot always reduce costs because “sharing is not a formof exchange” (Woodburn 1998).

As for the second point, Wiessner distinguishes strict(or “prototype”) egalitarian societies like those of Africanhunter-gatherers from societies like the Enga that permita certain degree of competition and takes the latter as“a starting point” for examining the development of in-stitutional inequality. In fact, a “prototype” egalitariansociety may be seen as “polar type” any divergence fromwhich faces a strong reaction in terms of the existingegalitarian norms. Incremental changes toward inequal-ity are usually difficult in such a society. Nevertheless,there are always some individuals who work, procure,and give more than others do. Such variation in individ-ual competence and personality naturally occurs in anyhuman society, whether egalitarian or not. In contrastto the situation among the Nambikuara (Levi-Strauss1955), in an egalitarian society there is no “consensus”among group members to assign leadership to such aperson. Germs of inequality are always present, but theyare negated, sometimes by elaborate means such as thedistinction of the owner from the hunter just described.While African hunter-gatherers use this means toachieve egalitarianism, in other situations it may facil-itate institutional inequality. In fact, Central Africanfarmers often lend guns to Aka hunter-gatherers and con-


trol the ownership of the kill. Thus the institution de-veloped in the first situation may be used for quite op-posite purposes in the second. There is therefore apossibility that inequality may emerge even from “pro-totype” egalitarian societies through the interaction ofagents, egalitarian structure, and exogenous events,though it may take a different path.

anton ploegCenter for Pacific and Asian Studies, NijmegenUniversity, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 6 xi 01

Wiessner and Tumu’s (1998) book Historical Vines sig-nificantly advanced our knowledge of the recent prehis-tory of the New Guinea Highlands. Therefore it is for-tunate that Wiessner now addresses some of the broaderissues raised by the splendid body of data on which thatbook is based. Reviewing the past 250–400 years of theEnga past, she concludes that the Enga had taken im-portant steps towards the institutionalization of in-equality by the time European intruders arrived, despitethe pervasive egalitarianism of their way of life. The pe-riod covered was one of far-reaching sociocultural changeprompted in part by the introduction of the sweet potato.

In my view the trend towards institutionalization ofinequality was less clear-cut than Wiessner makes out.Major institutions such as the Great Wars and the Teeemerged and blossomed in the period covered, and Wiess-ner makes it clear that they offered scope for social ad-vancement and the consolidation of inequality. How-ever, the Wars were discontinued, and the Tee had be-come unwieldy and seemed on the verge of breaking up.As far as the Great Wars are concerned, Wiessner pointsout that “in opting for the Tee cycle Great War leadersmade a fatal error for the institutionalization of leader-ship.” In the Tee some men had far better access to in-formation about exchange opportunities than others, butthe breakup of the cycle may well have reduced the ac-cess differential and so have inhibited the consolidationof inequality.

Wiessner’s idea that social inequality is deeply rootedin human behaviour—given the hierarchy prevailingamong non-human primates—and the corollary thatwhat she describes is the re-emergence of inequalityseem useful to me. Here too I would qualify her state-ment, pointing out that the ethnography of tribal soci-eties shows the ubiquity of arrangements by means ofwhich the great majority of men can marry and/or havelegitimate offspring. Is there reason to suppose that thesearrangements are recent in the evolution of humansocieties?

Her main point, that egalitarianism is not the productof simplicity, seems unexceptional to me. It is the notionof “egalitarian society” that seems questionable. It setsup a category of societies seemingly contrasting withinegalitarian ones, but, as she points out, none of the so-called egalitarian societies is undifferentiated, and sheincludes among “egalitarian” societies those harbouring

inequalities based on age, sex, and ability. The transfor-mation of such societies towards more inequality mayin part be based on those pre-existing differentiations. Iam therefore inclined to analyse the institutionalizationof inequality in terms of transformations of inequalitiesrather than as a shift from one category of society toanother.

paul roscoeDepartment of Anthropology, University of Maine,Orono, Maine 04469-5773, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 23 xi 01

Wiessner is quite right that recent theoretical develop-ments concerning the emergence of inequality have paidinsufficient attention to the recursive interaction ofstructure and agency. Perhaps, as she suggests, egalitar-ian society has been taken to constitute a “slate of sim-plicity,” but the poverty of detailed, long-term data onthe subject is surely also to blame. Archaeology furnishesdata that embrace long periods of time but are notori-ously crude for gauging the intricacies and consequencesof political action. Ethnographic fieldwork can providethe fine detail of these processes but seldom for morethan a decade or two and never entirely “uncontami-nated” by recent colonial and global processes. Wiess-ner’s project is important because it uses a remarkable,almost unique ethnohistoric data set to probe in consid-erable ethnographic detail more than two centuries ofprecontact Enga political process.

What Wiessner achieves is impressive. My main res-ervation concerns aspects of long-term political processthat she leaves largely unconsidered. In depicting egal-itarian and hierarchical institutions and ideologies as in-struments for reducing transaction costs—as economicstructures, in effect—she sidelines the political natureof the practices that generate inequality and overlooksa more fundamental process that underlies “surface” pro-cesses such as the appearance of the Tee and the GreatWars.

Wiessner’s principal focus is the managerial (or “vol-untaristic”) aspects of the emergence of political hier-archy. Applauding the managerial model for its thesisthat inequality can take root only when a populationstands to gain real benefits from stronger leadership, shedescribes, for example, how Enga managers establishedtheir ascendancy by hitching their political wagons toinstitutions like the Tee and the Great Wars that reducedtransaction costs to the benefit of all. Nothing to quarrelwith there: any astute political entrepreneur will pro-mote a socially beneficial innovation if it can be playedto his or her advantage. It must be emphasized, though,that would-be leaders will seize on any resource thatallows them to build power relations (inequality), in-cluding, to the extent that they can get away with it,innovations that do not advance—indeed, may disadvan-tage—public benefit. To the east of the Enga, contact-eraChimbu big-men had established cadres of henchmen


that they could deploy to advance their agendas throughfear (Bergmann 1971:195). Throughout New Guinea, big-men also created information-gathering and -dissemi-nating networks that allowed them superior control ofsemantic frameworks and permitted them to distort in-formation to their advantage. By judicious dissemination(or outright concoction) of tales of enemy infamy, forinstance, they might fan wars that advanced their inter-ests over others’ (see also Sillitoe 1978:253–54).

It is unclear whether Wiessner would disagree. To givethe complexity of political-evolutionary processes itsdue, though, it follows that we must attend to the locusof this power creation—leaders, followers, and the in-teractions among them. Would-be leaders are drawn fromone end of a human bell curve. Through idiosyncrasiesin their biology or their enculturation, they have strongambitions to be leaders, and to become such they mustbe more astute than their fellows in comprehending thestructure of their society and how to make it work forthem. Making use of these qualities, they attempt tobuild power relations by manipulating this struc-ture—the material, social, and symbolic capital availableto them. To be sure, all followers manipulate leaders justas all leaders manipulate followers, but leaders becomethe leaders because they are better at the game.

The crucial point is that this manipulation necessarilyinvolves interaction. In pre-European societies like theEnga, all interaction is face-to-face, all locomotion byfoot. Under these circumstances, increases in populationdensity become vital in facilitating interaction and per-mitting the politically gifted to augment their power andconsolidate it over time in institutional structurers (Ros-coe 1993). The reason the !Kung are so egalitarian, Ithink, has less to do with an egalitarian ethos or theircapacity for egalitarian rebellions than with the un-avoidable fact that there are simply not enough hours inthe day for a would-be leader to build a significant powerbase when to do so necessarily involves interacting withand manipulating people who are scattered across a de-sert at no more than 1 person/km2. When the emergenceof leadership is so constrained, ethoses are going to beegalitarian and rebellion easy.

Contrast the !Kung situation with events among theEnga: Partly in response to the introduction of the sweetpotato, Enga population rose dramatically: Wiessner andTumu (1998:55–56, 387–88) estimate a growth from10,000–20,000 around 1770 to 150,000 in 1980. The con-comitant increases in density must have greatly reducedleaders’ transaction-travel costs in building inequality.Underlying the “surface” processes by which Enga lead-ers institutionalized inequality, in other words, was a“deep” process rooted in a phenomenal enhancement ofthe potential for interaction and political manipulationas population densities rose in the wake of the sweetpotato.

frank k. salterMax-Planck-Institut fur Verhaltensphysiologie Human,Von-der-Tann-Strasse 3, D-82346 Andechs, Germany([email protected]). 21 xi 01

As Wiessner notes, theories of political change are weakin describing and explaining the endogenous processesthat caused the transition from egalitarian to hierarchi-cal societies. The problem is acute for our understandingof the cultural evolution of political institutions, whichcannot advance very far without behavioural analysis.Wiessner’s paper helps change that. In particular, it lendssupport to and demands a modification of one approachto understanding political evolution, social technologytheory. According to this theory, social forms, includinginstitutions, are constructed from the innate human be-havioral repertoire in a limited number of combinationsaccording to the species’s evolved “biogrammar.” Theengines of growth in social technologies have been pop-ulation growth following the Neolithic Revolution, hu-mankind’s “polytechnic intelligence” (Caton 1988), andcultural evolution under economic and social selection.While drawing on the full gamut of behavioural disci-plines, the theory has its origins in anthropology (Reyn-olds 1973, Fox 1971), sociology (Tiger and Fox 1989[1971]), political science (Caton 1988, Geiger 1988), and,most fundamental, human ethology, the subdisciplinededicated to documenting the species’s behavioural rep-ertoire and working out combinatory rules (Eibl-Eibes-feldt 1972, 1989, 2001; Fox and Fleising 1976). Socialtechnology theory has been applied to such phenomenaas legitimation (Geiger 1988), the political history of thecommercial republic (Caton 1988), indoctrination (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2001, Salter 2001), and command hierarchy(Salter 1995), but despite its anthropological and etho-logical origins it is ethnographically underdeveloped.Wiessner’s paper makes a strong start toward filling thisempirical gap.

Wiessner addresses a vexed problem of biogrammar,one not of parsing but of the technicalities of writingparagraphs: how did hierarchical societies emerge fromegalitarian ones? She documents the role of human socialdesigns, their unintended consequences, and the accu-mulation of the resulting institutions across generationsin one culture, the Enga of Papua New Guinea. One so-cial technology described by Wiessner, the trade in cults,is particularly instructive. Acceptable means for intro-ducing a cult to a clan were a necessary condition forthe cult to cause change. Cults were purchased fromother groups by leaders and introduced on a trial basis.This exemplifies the broader point made by Wiessnerthat whatever institutions were introduced to this as-sertively egalitarian society must have been acceptableto group members. The description of the diffusion andmodification of cults among the Enga deals with thechoice of cults based on perceived efficacy in changingbehaviour, their sometimes unintended consequences,the process by which new cults were imported and testedby a clan, accompanying training by religious experts,asymmetries in information, and sometimes a rudimen-


tary division and inheritance of the tasks involved insocial control. Viewed as a stage in political evolution,one can see how these factors could lead to hierarchy.

Wiessner’s description of the processes and motives of“managers” adds vital behavioural detail concerning cul-tural group strategies (Soltis, Boyd, and Richerson 1995).The group strategies represented by new institutionswere not purely self-promoting strategies installed byself-aggrandizers but largely intended to benefit thegroup. “New institutions arose . . . when individuals,usually clan leaders, recognized the potential in spon-taneous events, discussed these with fellow clanspeople,and attempted to frame them into more formal insti-tutions to address group problems.” Wiessner describesgrades of punishment used to control free riders and self-aggrandizers, which are critical to any theory of groupstrategizing (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1982, Boyd and Richerson1992).

Wiessner makes the important point that egalitariansocieties are governed by institutions that act to main-tain equality: “Egalitarianism is the outcome of complexinstitutions and ideologies created and maintained bycultural means which empower a coalition of the weakerto curb the strong.” However, she presents no evidenceto support her contention that “egalitarian coalitionsvary as greatly in configuration, composition, scope, andnature as hierarchical power structures.” Providing suchevidence would entail a survey of political technologiesin hierarchical and egalitarian societies, which, as far asI am aware, has not been attempted.

Social technology theory has not paid sufficient atten-tion to issues of agency and unintended outcomes.Wiessner offers findings, theory, and methods for ad-vancing our understanding of the behavioural dimensionof political evolution.

kazuyoshi sugawaraFaculty of Integrated Human Studies, KyotoUniversity, Yoshida Nihonmatsu, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto606-8501, Japan ([email protected]).21 xi 01

Wiessner’s paper is a new contribution to the anthro-pological effort to solve the enigma of egalitarianism. Itis surprising that an anthropologist can so thoroughlyreconstruct 250 years of the economic-political historyof a nonliterate society by analyzing oral tradition. Inthis respect, this paper demonstrates the power of his-torical ethnography. Wiessner’s most ambitious goal isto “grasp the tension between agency and structure.”However, the detailed comparisons among the eastern,central, and western Enga do not succeed in depicting aclear image of this tension. I would like to point out fourinterrelated problems:

1. Egalitarianism is a complex system which integratesdifferent layers of social life—politics, economy, socialorganization, values, and ethics. Each layer is ultimatelyrealized and negotiated through everyday face-to-face in-teractions. “Agency” needs to be examined primarily at

this level. A bird’s-eye view of the major changes in theeconomy is apt to miss the indigenous reality in whichthe Enga experienced “cooperation,” “competition,”“coalition,” and so on (all of which are Western inter-pretive terms). Although Wiessner claims that actors’choices are often not “rational,” she describes the actsand choices of the Enga mostly in transactional termsas if they were “dispassionate agents.” In order to un-derstand the nature of competition, it is indispensableto complement transactional interpretation with moredetailed analysis of the “spontaneous events” that shedlight on the dynamic aspects of emotional life in egali-tarian societies, for example, ambivalence between envyof and respect for the leader.

2. Wiessner chooses a society that tolerates some com-petition and “moderate” inequality as a more appropriatestarting point than a “prototypic” egalitarian societysuch as the !Kung San. This choice, supported by theassumption that “most humans, past and present, in-habited richer environments” than the Kalahari, leads tothe theoretical marginalization of the San societies. Butwhat does she mean by a “rich” or a “high-risk” envi-ronment? There is no independent criterion for judgingany ecological setting “rich” or “poor.” One can onlyevaluate the balance between the carrying capacity ofthe environment and the growth rate of the human (oranimal) population inhabiting it. More curiously, Wiess-ner fails to refer to many works on the African Pygmies,another prototype of radical egalitarianism in a contras-tive environment. Her argument implies that the “pro-totype” of egalitarian societies had been compelled tonegate competition by environmental pressure. If someinnovation in subsistence allows the surplus to be usedfor exchange, then an irreversible process begins throughwhich the disposition to competition is released fromrepression. In other words, Wiessner’s formulation of theemergence of inequality is achieved at the expense ofelucidating the origin of prototypic egalitarianism.

3. On this point the theory proposed by Junichiro Itani(1988) deserves to be considered. Itani admits that mostprimate societies are based on fundamental inequality,but he also pays special attention to signs of “condi-tioned equality” embodied in various types of primatesocial interaction, for example, play, greeting, and foodsharing. He argues that a profound fear of “civil ine-quality” is prevalent not only among hunter-gatherersbut also among various African pastoralists and slash-and-burn agriculturalists. Agreeing with Itani’s insightthat the orientation toward equality is deeply rooted inhuman evolutionary history, I doubt that “moderate”inequality is the most appropriate starting point for theelucidation of egalitarianism.

4. North’s definition of institutions as “the rules ofthe game” is the most unintelligible aspect of Wiessner’stheoretical framework. In what respects do the rules ofthe game differ from mere rules? According to Searle’sspeech-act theory, which distinguishes constitutive rulesfrom regulative rules, the game is the most representa-tive activity governed by the former. However, the rulesgoverning the Great Wars, the Tee cycle, spirit cults, and


so on, cannot be regarded as constitutive rules, in whichtautological definitions of all possible acts must be em-bedded. It is more likely that North’s theory is a versionof game theory, as Wiessner quotes his argument aboutplayers’ trying to maximize wealth. But the validity ofgame theory is usually based on the assumption thatplayers adopt the optimal strategy within the constraintsof preestablished rules. The possibility of changing therules cannot be derived from this strategy, because itrequires a higher logical type. Thus, when Wiessnerwrites, “The rules of the game were changing,” it soundslike empty rhetoric. The plausibility of her historicalanalysis would not be damaged if the metaphor of the“game” were eliminated.

Reply

polly wiessnerSalt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A. 11 xi 01

I thank all of the commentators; some substantive issueshave been raised, and certainly my future work has beencut out for me. I will begin my reply with a few pointsabout terms and categories. Ploeg and Hayden questionmy definition of egalitarian societies. No wonder, for, asClark aptly remarks, “egalitarianism” is perhaps themost infamous malapropism in anthropology—all soci-eties sport some inequalities. I include as egalitarian so-cieties with age and sex differences because I know ofno societies without such distinctions. People of differ-ent ages or sexes in all societies pursue different social,economic, and reproductive interests; what constitutesinequality and what constitutes different interests canbe difficult to distinguish. I agree with Ploeg that the“transformation” of inequalities in a society is influ-enced by preexisting differentiation by age andsex—coalitions which enforce equality are often formedalong the lines of age and sex. Ploeg queries my concep-tual separation of achieved inequalities and institution-alized inequalities—whether the two are distinguishedby more than degree. I feel that there is a significantqualitative difference between the two. Once inequalityis institutionalized, the enormous amount of energy ex-pended on scheming, putting down rivals, leveling, ordeciding whom to support is reduced. Institutionalizedinequality should also curb the competition that fuelsrunaway surplus production.

In response to Hayden, I chose Fried’s concept of egal-itarianism because the arguments I am advancing requireno further categorization. Assurance of equal access toresources and status positions and the repression of in-terpersonal dominance is achieved by institutions thatreduce the transaction costs of social and economicexchange in small-scale societies. Whether some indi-viduals do better than others within these institutionsand receive recognition for their achievements does notalter this role of egalitarian institutions. I did not use

the term “transegalitarian” because in their original for-mulation Clark and Blake (1994:18) equated transegali-tarian societies with “emergent chiefdoms.” To use“transegalitarian” would be to subscribe to the neoe-volutionary sequence and to write an end to a story—thatEnga would be transformed from an egalitarian societyinto a chiefdom—before the story ended.

Boehm’s suggestion that humans have an ancient pho-bia against one treating another dominantly is funda-mental. Actually, he misreads me here—I too suggestdeep roots for egalitarianism in the introduction, as doesthe evidence of the primatologist Itani summarized inSugawara’s comment. Boehm’s proposal is further sup-ported by Salter’s (1995) ethological analysis of the dis-tribution of emotional expression across seven organi-zational types in Australia. His results indicate thatinstitutional hierarchy is constrained by the human be-havioral repertoire because humans have an aversion tosubordination. Thus, with the formation of hierarchy,superiors usually soften their commands or pose themas suggestions or requests. Such measures lower resis-tance to command, leaving the hierarchy intact at thelevel of policy formation. The deeply rooted aversion todominance pointed to by Boehm (1999a), Salter, and oth-ers (see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989) is a disposition that wouldgreatly facilitate the evolution of egalitarian institutionsto foster cooperation. Moreover, Salter’s urban ethologysuggests that hunter-gatherer societies are not the onlyresearch sites for exploring such questions and that an-thropologists have much to gain by applying their meth-ods to the study of the full gamut of modern populations.

Aswani disagrees that transaction costs are high insmall-scale societies on the grounds that such societieshave stable relations, repeated interactions, direct rela-tions, and shared beliefs and practices. But I would arguethat these features of small-scale societies flourish pre-cisely because they are facilitated by egalitarian insti-tutions. Many shared beliefs and practices are the prod-uct of egalitarian institutions and ideologies; equalityavoids the offense of dominance discussed above, whichwould lead to unstable relations; direct and repeated re-lations are facilitated when dominance does not threaten“face”; and interactions are more likely to be repeatedwhen relations of dominance and submission do notthreaten or offend. I would agree with Aswani that kin-related altruism plays an important role in cooperation(Wiessner 2002), but cooperation in human societies ex-tends far beyond the bounds of relatedness which wouldhave significant genetic payoffs. My response to Ichi-kawa is similar—that information on nonrelatives isstandardized by egalitarian institutions, lowering thecosts of social and economic exchange. I appreciate theinsights presented at the end of Ichikawa’s comments.

Aswani argues that “it is hard to determine what camebefore the period covered by Wiessner without archae-ological evidence,” but perhaps it is even harder to de-termine what came before given the available archaeo-logical evidence! The three major archaeologicalexcavations in Enga indicate that the area was inhabitedfor more than 10,000 years (Bulmer 1975, Kobayashi and


Hayakawa 1971, and the unpublished excavations by JoMangi at Kutepa Rock Shelter). Sites are located at al-titudes ranging from 1,300 to 2,300 m. None of thesesites has yielded information relevant to pre–sweet-po-tato land use, settlement patterns, or social inequalities.Pollen evidence from Birip in the mid-Lai Valley col-lected by Walker and Flenley (1979) has been interpretedby Golson (1977, 1982) as indicating that forest clearancebegan around 4,000 b.p., most likely as a result of taro-based agriculture. Recovery of forest taxa from around2,000–2,500 b.p. may indicate more intensive agricul-tural practices; an increase in casuarina pollen at 1,200b.p. may suggest tree fallowing. More we do not know.Oral traditions suggest that pre–sweet-potato agriculturewas intensive in eastern and central Enga but that in-tensive pig production in the pursuit of economic or so-cial advantage did not begin until well after the intro-duction of the sweet potato.

If one moves away from Enga to the rather differentenvironments of the Kuk site near Mt. Hagen, excavatedby Golson (1977, 1981, 1982; Golson and Gardner 1990),or the Haeapugua Swamp, near Tari (Ballard 1995, 2001),excavations and pollen analysis have revealed changingpatterns of land use which are very difficult to interpretin terms of changing social and political factors. Inferredsocial and political conditions behind changing patternsof land use for Kuk have been rewritten over the pastthree decades to fit ethnographic evidence or in responseto changing theoretical perspectives in ethnography (Bal-lard 1995:appendix A1). To use interpretations based onthe 20th-century ethnographic situation in the Kuk areato establish a pre–sweet-potato baseline for Enga wouldinvolve circular reasoning. Only when more archaeolog-ical evidence is available will we have some idea of whatwent before the period covered by historical traditions.Aswani’s own work in New Georgia is impressive andenviable for its use of oral and archaeological sources. Itprovides a fascinating basis for interregional comparison.

Sugawara makes the excellent point that a bird’s-eyeview of major changes is apt to miss the reality of Engaexperiences. For this reason, in Historical Vines we didinclude substantial appendices with translations of orig-inal texts. It is indeed a priority to go on to carry out afine-grained analysis of audiotapes and examine these inlight of the social technology theory outlined in Salter’scomment. However, before transactional interpretationis undertaken, the strengths and weaknesses of usinghistorical testimony and traditions for this purpose mustbe evaluated. Historical testimonies, couched in sym-bolic speech, often do not portray a given situation fromboth sides, and this means that they are less amenableto transactional analysis than records of live events.

Ballard presents an intriguing contrast of trajectoriesof change between the Huli and their Enga neighbors,and the Enga-Huli difference summarized by Ballard isnot a construct emerging from different theoretical“takes” of researchers—Ballard and I have actively ex-changed and compared material since 1990. The Engathemselves recognize that ritual power increases as onemoves westward, with the few powerful ritual experts

who exist in Enga living along the Enga-Huli border. Thedisplacement of ritual authority by political and eco-nomic entrepreneurs after the introduction of the sweetpotato does not appear to be unique to the Huli (Strathern1993, Modjeska 1991). What I would question in Ballard’ssummary, however, is that there existed a tight rela-tionship between ritual and economic power to the ex-tent that Ballard claims—that hereditary ritual familiesmonopolized regional networks of trade. In a very stim-ulating article, Ballard (1994) shows that through theDindi Gamu cult, Huli ritual experts managed to en-shrine the central position of the Huli, who are otherwisepoor in trade goods, in the regional circulation of ideasand materials; ritual roads were trade routes. But he doesnot provide any evidence to support the claim that cer-tain families of ritual experts held a monopoly over thetrade or that they were wealthier than others. Nothingin early Enga historical traditions concerning Huli trad-ers or the work of Mangi (1988) on Huli trade suggeststhat long-distance trade could not be undertaken byanybody who chose to do so. Much remains to be workedout regarding the relationship between ritual and eco-nomic power in highland New Guinea prior to first con-tact with Europeans. As Harrison has demonstrated forthe Avatip in Sepik, practice in ritual hierarchy andeveryday life may not be closely linked; the two may bealternative forms of social action.

Roscoe feels that I sideline more fundamental pro-cesses of agency on the part of political entrepreneurs. Ido not intend to underestimate the efforts of gifted man-agers in bringing about change, but I wonder if it can beassumed that would-be leaders in kin-based societieswant to seize on any resource that allows them to buildinequality even if their actions bring disadvantage to kin.Support of kin is one of the highest values in highlandNew Guinea societies and one of the pressures that leadsto misappropriation of government funds today. Nastymoves and motives are directed at threatening rivals orcompeting groups, not clan “brothers.” Although leadersare indeed drawn from one end of the bell curve, peopledo not have to be at the high end to recognize when theirrights as equals are being violated. A threat to the rightsof one group member is often perceived as a threat toall—leveling coalitions form rapidly.

I am sympathetic to Roscoe’s arguments about density,except for his ideas about the !Kung. (!Kung engage indaily exercises to maintain equality within villages [Lee1993, Marshall 1976, Wiessner 1996].) Enga elders citepopulation increase as a significant force behind changeon two accounts. First, an expanding population broughtnew opportunities for exchange. Second, institutions likethe egalitarian clan meeting, in which individual interestis evaluated in terms of clan goals (Sackschewsky,Gruenhagen, and Ingebritson 1970), were too cumber-some to organize complex exchange networks. More hi-erarchically organized institutions were required as theeconomy grew in scale. Enga openly state that the riseof the great kamongo (big-men or managers) and newforms of symbolic communication went hand in handwith the development of more hierarchical institutions.


What is interesting, however, is that as population den-sity increased, managers had to go farther afield to formties that would allow them to assemble more wealth atone place and at a given time. Just prior to contact, Tee-cycle managers walked the paths of Enga for a year ormore to organize a Tee cycle because the labor of thosein nearby clans could not be exploited to fulfill the man-agers’ ambitions. Relationships of equality would haveto be ruptured before aspiring men could make the mostout of density.

Both Clark and Helbling bring up the very legitimatecriticism that my analysis would be enhanced by furtheruse of the new institutional economics to elucidate theconstruction of hierarchical institutions as the economygrew in scale. I must admit that even though I find con-cepts from institutional economics very productive forunderstanding institutions, I have had difficulty in ap-plying its models to account for the complexities of theEnga case. I am still working on it. Helbling lays out avery stimulating scenario in which he accounts for theemergence of Enga inequality in terms of individual se-lection of big-men dependent on group selection by war.

Intergroup competition via warfare did play a crucialrole in Enga history. It set off the population movementsthat spurred the development of the Tee, Kepele, andGreat Wars; it motivated the import of cults; it even-tually required the extension of war reparations to theenemy; and it provided one force behind the growth ofthe Tee cycle. All of these developments gave managersopportunities to gain influence. But I have reservationsabout attributing the development of institutionalizedinequalities solely to intergroup competition via warfare.First, there is no evidence that Enga warfare was drivenby scarce resources essential to clan survival. Second,motivations of warriors often did not conform to groupprojects. Some individuals fought in response to the trig-gering offense, some for the entertainment, some to set-tle old grudges or take revenge, some to make a namein battle, some to make a name or forge new ties in peacesettlements. Intergroup competition was often brewedin the interest of individual goals (Sillitoe 1978). Third,ties with maternal kin and, to a lesser degree, affinal kinwere sometimes as strong as clan ties—cooperative “or-ganizations” crosscut clan boundaries. Fourth, Enga his-torical records do not portray warfare as the singular driv-ing force in history, and the content of Enga bachelors’cults, ancestral cults, and other rituals do not revolvearound achieving advantage in warfare. Finally, selectionfor the highest tier of managers—Tee-cycle organizersand Great War leaders—was as dependent on external ason internal support. For example, to launch a successfulTee, managers had to elicit confidence and cooperationfrom men in some 200–300 other clans. Great War lead-ers were not only approved by their own sides but alsosummoned by their opponents to come forward and or-ganize intergroup competition between pairs of tribes.In the Great Wars, neither of the opposing sides gainedresources vis-a-vis the other by winning or losing. Thebulk of the wealth acquired by managers was not appliedto clan needs but passed on to key partners in other clans

or tribes, particularly to maternal and affinal kin. Inshort, group selection via warfare was far less importantfor the rise of the great kamongo who managed regionalaffairs than for local leaders. And it was for the greatkamongo that leadership began to be institutionalized.

Certainly every author has wondered “Did I really saythat?” in reaction to statements processed by commen-tators. Here I would like to clear up two points that I donot intend to make. First, I am not suggesting that in-equality is a product of communitarian dynamics inwhich self-interested agents play no role as Hayden pro-poses. I am merely arguing that those who pursue self-interest with no communitarian considerations oftenhave a quick, brutal demise. Second, I did not intend toportray Enga as a weak chiefdom, as Boehm suggests inpassing, or to describe the institutionalization of in-equality as being clear-cut as Ploeg and Ballard imply.As Clark and Blake have noted (1994:19): “Any transitionto a non-egalitarian system requires the emergence ofnew practices as a necessary prelude to structuralchange. And these must be maintained and financed longenough to make practices habitual.” Owing to acceler-ating competition and a wealth of natural resources, newinstitutions were changing too rapidly or were not prac-ticed for long enough for the inequalities they generatedto become habitual and truly institutionalized. ThoughEnga had taken important steps toward institutionalizedinequality by first contact with Europeans, it is by nomeans certain that in the long run they would have de-veloped into a society with stable, institutionalized hi-erarchical inequalities.

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