Mesolithic Geopolitics
Geopolitics among territorial sedentary hunter-gatherers is a complex mix of defending resource spaces from trespass and organizing cooperation among groups.[262] Between groups of ethnohistorically known, sedentary, diversified foragers, trespass was the most frequent cause of disputes.
In indigenous northern California before the arrival of the Europeans, a small-scale world-system composed of sedentary hunter-gatherers was organized as an interpolity system of autonomous territorial “tribelets”—usually two or three villages recognizing the authority of a single headman.[263] Leadership in these polities was based mainly on the ability of the headman (sometimes a headwoman) to make coherent speeches on important occasions such as those ”big times” in which a tribelet would invite people from other tribelets to come to a feast. But headmen also tended to be able to afford more than one wife, sometimes as many as four. A preference for sororal polygyny meant that the headman's second wife was usually a sister of his first wife, but the third (or fourth) wife was likely to be the daughter of a headman of another tribelet. Thus sororal polygyny was a partial constraint on the ability of headmen to form interpolity alliances cemented by marriage. Intermarriage was still an important mechanism for forging inter- tribelet alliances, but the kinship system was not efficiently tuned to maximize such alliances. This limitation tended to help cap the small spatial scale of these polities and interpolity alliances.Reciprocal gift exchanges, dancing, feasting, and gambling were important integrative activities that occurred during big times, also called “trade feasts” by ethnographers. These trade feasts usually occurred when the host polity had a surplus of food. Ethnographers such as Vayda[264] think that these trade feasts were opportunities for groups to develop cooperative alliances that would have been useful during periods of scarcity and/or conflict.
There was inter-tribelet warfare, even among speakers of the same language. Violent interpolity encounters took two forms. There were raids in which one group would attack another, killing and taking captives, stealing stored food and other valuables. Raids occurred more frequently between tribelets that did not share a common or related language, and in areas in which control of some important resource was in dispute (e.g., a valuable lithic outcropping). A more frequent type of warfare was sometimes called a line war. In line wars the headmen of two disputing tribelets would bring warriors dressed for war and carrying weapons to an appointed place. At a signal, the two squads would shoot arrows or throw rocks at one another until some were injured. Then the two headmen would confer to see if an agreement resolving the conflict could be reached. If no agreement were reached, another round of shooting and throwing might ensue. This encounter continued until the headmen could reach an agreement. Line wars were more likely to occur between tribelets that shared a common language or linguistically related dialects. Charges of trespassing (unauthorized use of gathering or hunting sites claimed by a tribelet) often led to line wars. The institution of the line war allowed conflicts to be resolved with relatively little damage to the contending parties. But the more damaging raid wars also occurred, and some inter-tribelet relationships were understood as particularly conflictual—for instance, the valley-dwelling Wintus name for the hill-living Yana translates as “Enemy in the East.”
But even across these conflictive divides there was occasional trading and intermarriages. It should be said that even though there was warfare among tribelets in this system, war itself was not a very central preoccupation of these polities. They were mostly focused on subsistence pursuits and forms of recreation such as dancing and gambling.
The geopolitical logic in such a system is already one that might be termed antagonistic cooperation, because it interlinks both competitive and cooperative modes.
The clashes involved assessments of the relative fighting power of adversaries, risk, and the array of weapons available to each side. Ethnocentism intensified warfare, though weapons were lethal enough to motivate foraging bands to tame the hostilities.[265] Economic exchange (reciprocal gift-giving between the headmen of tribelets) provided a buffer against times of scarcity and helped to produce alliances that were useful when conflicts emerged. Reciprocal exchanges also reduced the propensity to raid during periods of shortage.[266]Chase-Dunn and Mann[267] conclude that the northern California world-system was an instance of an interaction network based on reciprocal gift-giving and warfare, without much of a core/periphery hierarchy in which core polities dominated and/or exploited non-core polities. Population density and the size and effectiveness of intervillage alliances were crucial factors in determining who won when raid wars broke out. Thus the Wintu (valley people with larger villages) tended to have the upper hand in warfare with hill people such as the Yana, who had smaller villages and thus fewer warriors to call on when a conflict broke out. Demographic power was the main arbiter in intergroup competition based on violence. But this demographic advantage was not used by the valley people to dominate and exploit the labor of the hill people. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Wintu had been very slowly encroaching on the territory of the Yana at the rate of around 30 years per kilometer.[268] This hardly constitutes a case of expansionist conquest of the kind known from the history of states and empires.
Trade in such systems was highly structured by the small territorial and demographic scale of polities. Long-distance trade ventures or procurement treks were extremely dangerous because individuals or small groups of “strangers” found in territory claimed by unknown others were likely to be killed.
All interpolity exchange of goods was between headmen of immediate neighboring polities or neighbors of neighbors who were also known. This “down-the-line” form of exchange nevertheless allowed highly valuable goods (such as bow staves and woodpecker scalps) to move rather long distances, and so linked polities that had no direct interactions with one another in a larger network of exchange. The geopolitical point here is that the absence of larger authorities and the very local nature of cooperative arrangements among polities restricted the size of trade networks. But even in these small-scale systems there were transregional phenomena, such as the use of clam-shell disc beads as a medium of transregional exchange, and a transregional sign language and counting schema. Via these cultural inventions, prestige goods and information could move from polity to polity, linking the people of the northern Sacramento Valley and surrounding mountains with those living in the delta region of the Sacramento and the adjacent Clear Lake region of California. Geopolitics was local, but it facilitated the emergence of long-distance down-the- line exchange networks.The comparative study of group identity and feelings of solidarity in anthropological perspective sheds important light on the issue of whether or not nationalism and the nation-state are entirely modern phenomena tied to the emergence of civic culture in Europe and analyzed as a process of nation-building in the postcolonial world. A bright line often divides modern nationalism, with its emphasis on popular sovereignty, from earlier multicultural empire states in which central culture was carried by elites but not by masses.[269] Modern nationalism is undoubtedly the most important socially constructed solidarity in the contemporary world-system. Global culture contains a template that is filled in by all states that claim membership in the club that is the United Nations.29 The “people” must have a unique historical identity, language, traditions, styles, etc., that distinguish them from their neighbors, and national pomp and ceremony are important ritual occasions that must not be mocked.
But group solidarity is an important variable in all polities and an anthropological framework of comparison suggests that sentiments of group solidarity have long played an important role in geopolitics. Early forms of “we-feeling” need to be carefully compared with modern nationalism in order to prehend the similarities and the differences.
Within Wintu tribelets, group solidarity was reinforced by invidious comparisons with neighboring tribelets. According to the Sacramento River villages, the people that lived on the Middle River (McCloud River) did not know how to properly prepare acorn mush. The Middle River people contend that duckbill created the universes, while all right-thinking people know that coyote created the universe as a kind of joke. Correct behavior and beliefs were contrasted with those of the neighboring polities, and geographical distance as well as linguistic differences increased the strength of othering until the point is reached in which distant strangers are seen as malevolent beings with which no cooperation is possible. Collective solidarity within the tribelet and among tribelets was expressed mainly in kinship terms, but these terms themselves were rather flexible. Group solidarity was important, especially when collective labor needed to be mobilized or when interpolity conflicts broke out. The polities that had more internal solidarity were better able to defend themselves.