Leadership Tips from the Polynesian Islands

I'm having a grand time with The Creation of Inequality by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus about which I will say more when I'm done with it, but for the moment, let me recount their summary of the three sources of power in Polynesia (channeling Irving Goldman):

The central concept of chiefly power was a life force the Polynesians called mana. Goldman defines mana as an odorless, colorless, invisible, supernatural energy that pervades people and things. ... Some Polynesian chiefs had so much mana that by touching them inappropriately, one could receive a jolt akin to being Tasered. . . 

A second source of power in Polynesia was tohunga, a term usually translated as “expertise.” Tohunga could refer to administrative or diplomatic skill, ritual skill, or craftsmanship. . . .

The third of Goldman’s sources of power was toa. While toa referred to a durable tree known as “ironwood,” it was also a metaphor for bravery and toughness. Toa was applied to warriors in general, and especially to those who distinguished themselves in battle. A key aspect of toa was that it allowed for a certain degree of social mobility. A warrior of humble birth could rise in prominence to the point where he had to be taken seriously, even by chiefly individuals.

Flannery, Kent ands Marcus, Joycc (2012-05-15). The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Kindle Locations 4101-4115). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Doesn't leave much out, does it?

Gamma

...[H]unter-gatherer egalitarianism is rather a sham.  ... [E]ven the most egalitarian of them had a dominance hierarchy as clear-cut as tht in any ape society. The difference is that for humans, the alpha elite were invisible supernatural beings, far too powerful to be overthrown, while the betas were ancestors who did the bidding of the alphas.  No "egalitarian" hunter-gatherer was ever more than a gamma in the social hierarchy,.

--Steven Mithen, "Foresomes and so on," reviewing and interpreting Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality (2012), London Review of Books 11 April 2013, 17-18, 17.  Cf. link, link, link.

Leadership Secrets of the Hunter Gatherers and Others

A while back I posted on Acemoglu's and Robinson's Why States Fail.  Faithful readers will recall that I was underwhelmed: quite a few diverting stories but it never really developed the necessary grit and gristle.  Jared Diamond used the phrase "just-so story," which struck me as hard but true.

Well here's news.  Now I find the book they might wish they had written.  Or more precisely, the book which, had they read it before they wrote their own, might have made their own much better.  That would be Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality, subtitled, "How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire."  Sp: an attempt to explore the assertion of Rousseau (whom they take as a point of departure," that we, though "born free" remain "everywhere in chains."  And how, exactly, did that happen?

Responding to Rousseau's puzzle, KM explore finding from--what, 20?  30?--different societies around the world.  Almost all are "prehistoric," although they do include helpful discussions of the Big Dogs in the Fight, the valleys of the Nile and of the Tigris-Euphrates.  They find--ah, well, now, what exactly do they find?  Here I hesitate.  For all my enthusiasm, I'll admit I find the book devilishly difficult to encapsulate.  I worry that part of the problem just might be the same thing that bothered me with AR--that they gloss through to much, never stopping to come to terms with exactly what they have uncovered.

There might be a grain of truth in this last, but I think I can offer  more generous reading.  I think the point here is that the data, on close scrutiny, is refractory, and does not lend itself to facile summary.  I'm guessing, in other words, that someone worked long and hard over that title and subtitle precisely to make sure they did not promise to deliver more than they felt they could. This must have driven the marketers wild (cf., e.g., "How Rome Fell!  Six Important Secrets Revealed, to Help You Enjoy a Better World!").  But if you've got the patience and the curiosity, it opens you up to a wealth of material.  And recognizing their own resistance to easy bullet points, let me see if I can wrestle some bullet points out of them, even if against their will.

• It did not all start with Sumer.   More generally, not even Sumer started with Sumer.  That is to say, the development of urban culture in Mesopotamia was not an act of creation ex nihilo, it was a slow-rolling arms-race competition between neighboring centers.  Moreover even if the Mesopotamians were special, you can find important prefiguring for almost everything relevant that happened there.
• There really are truly egalitarian societies. But on the evidence, they are fragile, marginal and desperately poor.
• In hunter-gatherer societies, men do the hunting, women do the gathering.  We knew that; we probably also knew that hunting is a dodgy enterprise: not everybody is good at it, and not everybody is lucky. 
• If you are good and lucky, of course you start building up wealth.  But here it gets really murky.  Sure as shootin' (heh!) these guys decide they want to pass some of the goodies on to their spawn.   Sometimes they get away with it; sometimes they don't, and in any event, there is likely to be some kind of a row.
• Now here comes one of my favorite takeaways.  It seems that if you are going to entrench your power, the best thing you can do is to associate yourself  with the local deity.  Not necessarily become a god (although that worked for the pharaohs).  But you put yourself a long leg up once you get the god to say "he's my guy."
• An important transition in the development of hereditary inequality is the shift from "men's houses" to "temples." This is a  tantalizing point that needs more exploration.  And it is intriguing (though not necessarily a contradiction) to consider the case of Athens--as strong a temple-centric city as ever there was,  yet nominally a "democracy" (yes, women, slaves, foreigners, imperial overreach blah blah. Still...)
• A critical "next stage" beyond local power is when you reach out and try to dominate your neighbors (by force or (heh!) diplomacy.   When it happened in Hawaii, it was so unexampled they didn't even have a word for it.  So they borrowed a word from their guests and called him a "king."
•  Oh, and--we really are a nasty piece of business.  Scalpings, head-huntings, cannibalism, mass execution, revenge killing, debt servitude, blah blah.  If there is any evidence that our predecessors were somehow nicer than we are, you're not going to find it here.  They just didn't have nukes.

 Et cetera.  I made more e-notes on this book, I think, than any other I've read  in Kindle.  I'm still trying to sort it--and them--out.  Meanwhile, this one is surely in competition for the best, the most move-the-ball-downfield book I've read this year.  But then, there have been several.

Reception Index:  Here are a couple of squibs I wrote about the book earlier.   I see that no one else in my Google Reader feed has chosen to comment on it.  And at the moment, the number of Amazon reviews = zero.  So also the number of reviews at the Harvard Press book page.  I do find one review in the Wall Street Journal.  The reviewer reads it as a brief in favor of hereditary monarchy, which strikes me as batty. Oh, and I just spotted another, this in the Times Literary Supplement. This one faults them for underplaying the role and story of women--which is probably a fair cop.

Best Books of the Year

It's time to name the best books of the year so naturally, serious people are asking, what will Buce name as the best books of the year?

Happy to oblige, at least with a shortlist of five.  But first, some groundwork.  One, I can kick out a lot of  (seemingly) not-very-good books because I just didn't finish them.  I'm sure I cost myself something that way, but I've finally  come to terms with the fact that it's not a moral judgment on me if I simply cast the book aside.  I do, however, stick to some books that drive me nuts, where the driving-me-nuts factor is aggravated by the intuition that they nonetheless seem to have something to offer.  See, e.g., this one.  I'm also setting aside narrative accounts of the financial crisis.  I think I've read about 40 of those so far since aught-eight and I'm not at all sure it is anything to be proud of.   At this point, they are too easy: they overlap and they tend to blur.  I suspect I have already forgotten the particular identities of several.  I'm also setting aside  David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 years, because I still can't make up my mind whether it is a really original piece of work or an overrated con job--maybe in ten years it will be easier to judge (but not for me, heh).  More perversely, I'm setting aside Daniel  Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, as just too popular: among other things, it is the only book read this year by both Mr. and Mrs. Buce.  And I guess Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise:  it's too soon (I read it just a couple of weeks ago), and much as I liked it, still it might turn out to be a flash in the pan.

With some hesitancy, then, I open the envelope and find that the first nominee is Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites.  This too is a choice I might regret once the hype wears off but it does seem to be one of the rare left-critique books of contemporary society that really seems to have something new to say, something eyond the usual talking points.  Second, Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower:  a wonderful biography by almost any measure, with a personal resonance for me because it parallels so much of my own life, but also fascinating study in the nature--the mystery--of leadership--what works and what doesn't, and how do you know?   Third, I'll have to make room for The Emperor of All Maladies  Siddartha Mukherjee's great history of cancer.  It sprawls, and a fair amount of it is a bit beyond me but it is at least a tour de force and probably bears intrinsic merit to match.  The experience was matched, I think, by the fact that at more or less the same time I was listening to Frank Snowden's marvellous lecture course on epidemics, from Yale.  That's another one, FWIW, on which Mr. and Mrs. Buce agree: we'd both rank it as the best audio/video learning we did all year.  

Number four is a tougher sell: Kent Flannery and  Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality.  I've inflicted it on at least two friends who seem to wonder why the hell I bothered.  I can take their point: it is sprawling; it is diffuse, and the authors are maddeningly unwilling to draw conclusions or even to offer summaries.  I suspect their response would be: look, what we have shown is that the world is a complicated place and evolves in mysterious ways.  We've shown it to you in all its richness and diversity and we don't apologie for not trying to trick it up with facile soundbytes.

Which leaves room for one more, and I'm going to go with  The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's unmatchable history of Bell Labs.  Like the Ike biography, it is fascinating for its intrinsic merits but also as a vehicle for further thought: what kind of society, what kind of leadership does it take to produce so successful an institution--or must we write it all off to good luck?

 Perhaps gratuitously, I'll note at least one big book that I did not read last year.  That would be  Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power  the umpteenth installment of Robert Caro's biography of the great drawler.   Johnson certainly deserves the full treatment and I guess nobody can fault Caro's diligence in research.  I read some of Caro's earlier Johnson stuff, but I kind of got off the train with Caro's account of the infamous 1948 primary.  I don't doubt, as Caro argues, that Johnson probably stole that election; I just can't come to terms with Caro's efforts to sanctify his opponent, Coke Stevenson. By everything I've ever heard  or read, Texas politics was a nest of scoundrels in those days and Stevenson was no better than par for the course.  I mention Caro now, however, partly to remind myself that there is one Caro book I really do want to go back and read: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which I've heard described as one of the best studies of public administration ever written, right up there with James Q. Wilson's   Bureaucracy.

And here's a book I did not read and probably should: Katherine Boo's, Beyond the Beautiful Forever.  That one might be Mrs. Buce's favorite of the year, and from all I hear, it deserves every bit of the credit she gives it. 

And one final item.  Oddly enough, the book that I may have given most thought to over the past few months is Timothy Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.  I say "oddly" because I don't think I realized how impressed I was with it at the time I read it: I liked it but since then it has been coming back and back. Might be partly because it dovetails so well with Gertner's Bell Labs book of which I wrote above.  But in fact, I didn't read Wu this year: I finished it back in the fall of 2011.  As time passes, it really looks like a keeper..

It's the Nats

We all remember Douglas Adams' theory of elections: ""Because if they didn't vote for a lizard,the wrong lizard might get in."  Finnerty and Marcus explain how this stuff works among the Kachin of North Burma:

The ancestors of every lineage became masha nats, “ancestor spirits,” and every household had shrines to them. Ancestor spirits were thought to intercede with the celestial nats on behalf of their descendants. When the Kachin were in rank mode, their chief had two household shrines, one for his human ancestors and one for Madai. Lower-ranked households, on the other hand, had only one shrine, at which they supplicated or scolded their human ancestors before making sacrifices to less-powerful nats. ...

 In Kachin society the lineages that worked the hardest and produced the greatest surplus could sponsor the most prestigious sacrifices and feed the most visitors. Their fellow Kachin, however, did not attribute such success to hard work; they believed that one only obtained good harvests through proper sacrifices to the nats. Wealth was seen not so much as the product of labor (and control over others’ labor) as the result of pleasing the appropriate celestial spirits. The key shift in social logic was therefore from “They must have pleased the nats” to “They must be descended from higher nats than we are.”

So there you have it.  Not the lizards, but the nats.

Flannery, Kent (2012-05-15). The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Kindle Locations 3914-3794). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.