The Reinvention of Primitive Society

Transformations of a Myth

Adam Kuper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134247202
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Invention of Primitive Society, Adam Kuper's best selling critique of ideas about the origins of society and religion that have been much debated since Darwin, has been hugely influential in anthropology and post-colonial studies.

This topical new edition, entitled The Reinvention of Primitive Society, has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of new research in the field. It coincides with a revival of the myth of primitive society by the 'indigenous peoples' movement', which taps into a widespread popular belief about the noble savage and reflects a romantic reaction against 'civilisation' and 'science'. By way of fascinating accounts of classic texts in anthropology, classical studies and law, the book reveals how wholly mistaken theories can become the basis for academic research and political programmes. In new chapters, Kuper challenges this most recent version of the myth of primitive society and traces conceptions of the barbarian, savage and primitive back through the centuries to ancient Greece.

Lucidly written and student friendly, this is the must-have text for those interested in anthropological theory and current post-colonial debates.

Part I
The idea of primitive society

The lofty contempt which a civilised people entertains for barbarous neighbours has caused a remarkable negligence in observing them, and this carelessness has been aggravated at times by fear, by religious prejudice, and even by the use of these very terms - civilisation and barbarism - which convey to most persons the impression of a difference not merely in degree but in kind.

(Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Society (1861), pp. 116-17)

Chapter 1
The myth of primitive society

Primitive society was initially regarded as a subject for lawyers. The founding father of British anthropology, E. B. Tylor, commented in 1865 that the investigation of questions such as the form of primitive marriage ‘belongs properly to that interesting, but difficult and almost unworked subject, the Comparative Jurisprudence of the lower races, and no one not versed in Civil Law could do it justice’.¹ The pioneering studies were written by lawyers - Henry Maine, Johannes Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan. The issues that they investigated - the development of marriage and the family, of private property and the state -were conceived of in legal terms. Their initial source, their common case-study, was provided by Roman law.

If one book is to be placed at the head of the Victorian studies of primitive society, it is perhaps Henry Maine’s Ancient Law, published in 1861, two years after The Origin of Species. Most of Maine’s specific ideas were soon discarded, but he restated a classic notion of the original human condition, and he made it seem directly relevant to the concerns of his contemporaries. He assumed that the first human beings were members of a corporate family group ruled by a despotic father. Gradually, the more powerful patriarchs attracted waifs and strays to join them. Local association became increasingly important. Ultimately, societies based on kinship were replaced by societies based upon territory. This transition from blood to soil, from status to contract, was the greatest revolution in human history.

In the very year in which Ancient Law was published, a Swiss professor of Roman Law, Johannes Bachofen, reread the Greek myths as sociological documents and came to the startling conclusion that the original family structure was not patriarchal but matriarchal. In 1865 a Scottish lawyer, J. F. McLennan, reacting to Maine’s theories, reached a similar conclusion to Bachofen, but apparently in ignorance of his work. The publication of McLennan’s Primitive Marriage in turn inspired an American lawyer, Lewis Henry Morgan, to develop the most influential of these new images of early social institutions. His best-known book, Ancient Society, appeared 16 years after Ancient Law. It echoed Maine’s title and belonged to the same universe of discourse.

These were not conventional legal texts, but the law itself was not, in those days, a narrow field. It included the history of law, and readily made room for speculative histories of the origins of law in primitive society. Great philosophical questions were up for debate, debates that could draw on the latest theories about history and about human nature. The massive presence of Darwin brooded over all discussions of human development in Victorian England, but the lawyers were generally more at home with the ideas of Herbert Spencer and of the Utilitarians. Macaulay, Stubbs, Freeman and Froude confronted them with new theories about the ancient origins of the British constitution.² They were also responsive to the findings of German philology, mediated in Britain by Max Müller. And they exchanged ideas about human origins and human evolution in the new ‘Anthropological’ societies. The Société d’Anthropologie de Paris was established in 1859, and similar initiatives followed in London in 1863 and in Berlin in 1869 (each, of course, with its own journal).

As anthropology began to be professionalised in the late nineteenth century, E. B. Tylor and James George Frazer established themselves as the leading authorities in the subject in Britain. Together they adjudicated the disputes between Maine, McLennan and Morgan, and settled the broad characteristics of primeval human societies. Primitive society was originally an organic whole. It then split into two or more identical building blocks. (This idea went back to Spencer.) The component units of society were exogamous, corporate descent groups, generally termed clans or gentes, which held goods and women in common. By the 1880s it was generally agreed (despite Maine’s continued dissent) that these groups were originally ‘matriarchal’, tracing descent in the female line only. Marriage took the form of regular exchanges of women between men of different descent groups. These social forms, no longer extant, were preserved in the languages (especially in kinship terminologies), and in the ceremonies of contemporary ‘primitive’ peoples.

It is striking how much agreement there soon was even on matters of detail. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, almost all the new specialists would have agreed with the following propositions:

1. The most primitive societies were based on blood relationships.
2. The basic units of society were ‘clans’ or ‘gentes’ - that is to say, descent groups which were formed by the descendants of a man, in the male line, or of a woman, in the female line.
3. Property was owned in common, and the women were held collectively by the men of the clan.
4. Marriages were prohibited between men and women belonging to the same clan. (There was, however, much debate as to whether or not there had been an even earlier period of ‘primitive promiscuity’.)
5. Each clan was thought to be descended from an animal or vegetable god, which it revered. This was ‘totemism’.
6. ‘Survivals’ of these institutions could be identified in the ceremonies or in forms of language of contemporary primitive societies.
7. Finally, after a great revolution, perhaps the greatest in human history, the descent groups withered away, private property rights were established, the modern family was born, and a territorial state emerged.

The rapidity with which the anthropologists worked out the idea of primitive society is very striking. However, its persistence is perhaps yet more extraordinary. Conventional histories of anthropology run through a succession of quasi-philosophical theories, but all these theories addressed the same idea of primitive society. This prototype persisted for well over a hundred years, despite the fact that the systematic empirical investigation of surviving ‘primitive’ societies began to be undertaken on any scale only in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

None of this would be particularly remarkable if the notion of primitive society was substantially accurate. But it is not. The whole conception is fundamentally unsound. There is not even a sensible way in which one can specify what a ‘primitive society’ is. The term implies some historical point of reference. It presumably defines a type of society ancestral to more advanced forms, on the analogy of an evolutionary history of natural species. However, human societies cannot be traced back to a single point of origin. Nor is there any way of reconstituting prehistoric social forms, classifying them, and aligning them in a time series. There are no fossils of social organisation.

The Upper Palaeolithic baseline

Fully modern human beings evolved in Africa some 150,000 years ago. The first migrants came to the Middle East over 40,000 years ago and entered Europe about 35,000 years ago. Here they gradually displaced the Neanderthal population, which represented an earlier human variety, also ultimately of African origin.

These fully modern humans are associated with a great cultural revolution. Its first traces have been found in the Middle East. Around 30,000 years ago it reached Europe. In archaeological terms, the revolution marked the transition from the long Palaeolithic age to the Upper Palaeolithic. It was not a rapid revolution, and some archaeologists suggest that it gained momentum in Europe only some 25-20,000 years ago. In Africa the parallel shift from Middle Stone Age to Upper Stone Age societies occurred only some 20,000 years ago. Nevertheless, however slowly, very great changes took place in the human way of life. Richard Klein judges that the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic ‘signals the most fundamental change in human behaviour that the archaeological record may ever reveal’ since the first invention of stone tools 1.5 million years ago.³ Lewis Binford emphasises particularly ‘the elaboration of burial; art; personal ornaments; new materials, such as bone, antler, and soft stone; long distance movement and/or circulation of goods; and increased variation in site size, duration, and content’. This outpouring of innovations led Binford to conclude that a more profound revolution had taken place. Language had developed, language in the modern sense, a flexible and creative medium, and it was language that created the conditions for ‘the appearance of culture’.⁴

Such fundamental changes must have had repercussions for the way in which communities were organised. It is, however, very difficult to say what Upper Palaeolithic societies were like. Clearly they were small-scale. Their economy was based on hunting and gathering. There was probably little social stratification. Fire was controlled and used for cooking, and there are signs of what may be domestic hearths, but no firm conclusions can be drawn about whether there were households, and if so who lived in them, or whether men and women had different tasks. People buried their dead, perhaps an indication of religious feelings. Some scholars speculate that cave art reflects beliefs in a spirit world. However, little else can be safely said about the cosmological ideas current during the Upper Palaeolithic. In any case, it cannot be assumed that all Upper Palaeolithic societies were alike. On the contrary, there were probably local variations in beliefs and in customs. After all, there were significant technological differences between neighbouring settlements, which led to the exchange of goods, sometimes over large distances.

In short, the archaeological evidence can tell us little about the nature of Upper Palaeolithic societies, or even about the extent to which they conformed to a common pattern. It is only with the development of writing, some 7,000 years ago, that a sociologically informed prehistory becomes possible. There is, however, an alternative strategy for the reconstruction of the remote past. Darwin himself compared variations between living species in order to make deductions about their common ancestors. Anthropologists have always been tempted, more simple-mindedly, to treat living populations as stand-ins for Stone Age societies. For the Victorian anthropologists, the people closest to the Stone Age were either American hunter-gatherers or the Australian Aborigines, but the most famous ‘Stone Age’ surrogates in modern anthropology are the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari desert. They owe their prominence to studies carried out in the 1960s and 1970s by Richard Lee and his associates. Their explicit goal was to find living equivalents to the first foraging peoples in the plains of Eastern Africa. But they dreamt that they were discovering the natural state of humanity. ‘We cannot avoid the suspicion that many of us were led to live and work among hunters because of a feeling that the human condition was likely to be more clear drawn here than among other kinds of societies.’⁵

The !Kung researchers were participating in a new movement in American anthropology that paid particular attention to the ways in which small populations of hunter-gatherers adapted to natural environments. The !Kung had no tools beyond digging-sticks, ostrich eggshell water containers, skin clothes and bags, and simple bows and arrows, and they had to make a living in a semi-desert.⁶ Nevertheless, they sustained themselves with surprisingly little labour. Adults worked on average the equivalent of two and a half days a week, and yet their diet was more than adequate by most established nutritional standards. This contradicted the old view that hunter-gatherers lived a marginal existence. Marshall Sahlins hailed the !Kung as the original affluent society,⁷ which may verge on hyperbole, but it seemed reasonable to suppose that ancient hunter-gatherers, who lived in more clement environments, must have enjoyed an even greater prosperity than the !Kung.

The economy of the !Kung rested on a division of labour. Both men and women gathered plant food, although women spent more time on this activity than did the men. However, only the men hunted. Hunting was in some ways a paradoxical activity: risky, time-consuming, costly in terms of energy expended. It was also less reliable than gathering, and vegetable foods provided the bulk of the !Kung diet. For much of the year, only some 20 per cent of the food intake was supplied by the hunters. But meat was prized, and in peak seasons the hunt provided up to 90 per cent of the food for the camp, and over the year a !Kung would get between 30 and 40 per cent of his or her calories from meat.

Some theorists now argued that the development of hunting played a crucial role in human evolution. African apes seldom engage in any but the most casual, opportunistic hunting. In the case of humans, successful hunting requires technical sophistication, planning, and co-operation. It also seems to depend in practice on a division of labour. Men do the hunting. Women gather food close to the home base, where they can keep an eye on the children. A male-female pair would therefore be best placed to feed themselves and a woman’s children, and this would favour the evolution of the family.⁸

The !Kung were soon being used as a template for the interpretation of archaeological materials on Upper Palaeolithic societies. However, Edwin Wilmsen, who had himself undertaken a long-term field study of the !Kung, launched what came to be called a revisionist thesis.⁹ His central criticism was that the evolutionists tore the !Kung from their real historical context. Kalahari foragers had lived in intimate contact with pastoral groups for perhaps a thousand years. For two centuries they had formed part of a complex Southern African society that included Europeans and Bantu-speaking farmers. They could not be taken to represent (in a phrase of Lee’s that Wilmsen threw back at him) ‘foragers in a world of foragers’. The !Kung were an underclass in a modern state.

Ethnographers of other Bushmen groups in the Kalahari suggested a different line of criticism. They described the variety of adaptations that Bushmen had made to local ecological conditions, and drew attention to differences of language, religious belief, settlement patterns and kinship arrangements. This argument could be generalised. If the !Kung were not typical of all Bushmen, there was even less reason to suppose that they could serve as the ideal type of all hunter-gatherers, throughout history. The Hadza of Tanzania, the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Congo, various Inuit groups, Malayan Aborigines, Amazonian hunter-gatherers were equally plausible exemplars, not to mention the Victorian favourites, the Australian Aborigines. In 1972, Marshall Sahlins lumped them all together in his Stone Age Economics, on the grounds that they all practised the ‘household mode of production’, a modest domestic economy in which everyone was content to rub along with just enough to live on. Julian Steward and Elman Service suggested that all these people lived in patrilineal bands, but there was abundant evidence that the local organisation and kinship systems of hunter-gatherers were not uniform. Nor did they have any unique social institutions. Alan Barnard showed, for instance, that the kinship system of some Kalahari Bushmen pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Reinvention of Primitive Society
• The Cover Illustration
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Part I: The Idea of Primitive Society
• Part II: Ancient Law, Ancient Society and Totemism
• Part III: Evolution and Diffusion: Boas, Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown
• Part IV: Descent and Alliance
• Part V: Back to the Beginning
• Notes
• References
• Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (3rd edition)
• Anthropology: The Basics
• Arguing With Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift