Why and how did consensual power emerge in the Early Agrarian era?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

As populations grew in the Early Agrarian era, the need tocoordinate activities must have become more apparent. Asmall community of just a few families can sort out its ownproblems and coordinate its communal tasks face-to-face, but a village of several hundred people, let alone a townof several thousand, can’t do this without leaders of somekind. As farming spread fromits centers of origin and more and more villages began toappear, some of them grew large enough to be describedas towns. These towns in turn began to exert control overthe smaller villages.

What tasks would people in burgeoning agrarian communitiesneed leaders to take care of? They needed leadersfor defense (to lead them in conflicts against neighboringcommunities); for religion (to mediate with the gods, particularlywhen the community was so dependent on successfulharvests); for legal matters (such as the settling ofdisputes); and for administration (for example, to maintainincreasingly complex irrigation systems). In other words, leaders were needed for the first time in human historyto take care of those tasks that the community could nolonger manage without a coordinating mechanism. Whichparticular individuals should be selected? What attributesdid one need to become a leader? The most obvious answerwas individuals who possess particular talent as a priest orshaman, a warrior or diplomat, or an organizer of groupprojects. But often the selection seems to have had little todo with talent and more to do with birth, particularly in theselection of a chief.

The form of government adopted by many EarlyAgrarian villages was a chiefdom, a complex human society,led by a chief, in which the chief or an elite noblegroup is selected to make decisions for the community. Asfarmers got better at their jobs, the community was able toproduce agricultural surpluses, which freed up the leadersfrom food production and allowed for the emergence of justsuch an elite group within the community. Generally chiefswere the oldest sons of the senior lineages within thesecommunities, which still thought of themselves in terms offamily, so that an accident of birth determined commonerand noble, and the possible futures open to each.

What remains unclear in this process is how agriculturalsurpluses began to accumulate in the first place, particularlywhen anthropologists are able to show that manyfarmers in simple villages today regard the notion of growingmore than they need to survive as somewhat ridiculous.The need to store grain to survive through the winter isoften undermined by archaeological evidence that thesesurpluses were often destroyed by rot or vermin.

An alternative explanation is that chiefs arose by givingaway surplus food or other goods to create a sense ofobligation from the recipients. Giftgiving was an essential means of maintaining intergroupharmony in the Paleolithic, and it remained significantin the Early Agrarian. This opened up a route to powerthrough the display of extravagant generosity to potentialsupporters, a method practiced by the so-called Big Menof Polynesian societies. Generosity (through gift giving)is highly valued in all small-scale societies. The Big Menused this deeply ingrained sense of reciprocity engenderedby gift giving to gain power. Modern anthropologicalstudies have shown how the potential Big Man graduallyaccumulates and stores away significant resources (pigs,blankets, other valuable or useful objects), then redistributesthem in times of communal need. The Big Man gainsconsiderable social leverage through the accumulation ofreciprocal IOUs, until eventually the beneficiaries of theBig Man’s largesse have no option but to support him.An Eskimo proverb vividly illustrates this path to power:“Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.”