Life Without Chiefs [Essay] Summary & Analysis

Summary of Life without Chiefs

- Marvin Harris

Introduction

Life without Chiefs is an essay based on the reality of human history in which the essayist Marvin Harris has afforded to define the concept of leadership in a new way. He begins his essay by exposing the reader to how leadership began in human evolution where he talks about the nomadic hunting and gathering stage when the people used to be divided into people in groups.

Literal Comprehension of Life Without Chiefs

According to the essayist, it has been just two thousand years that most people have left the stage of hunting and gathering and has settled themselves into a particular place. He claims that people lived without kings, queens prime ministers and other forms of posts for ten thousand years but life had run smoothly at that time as well. He writes that people used to help others with the expectation of getting the same in their needs. In fact, this reciprocity was a small society's bank. So, the man who declared himself king would be left alone to be the king of him. Similarly, there was no tradition of thanking even if someone helped another.

Slowly leadership got birth when human beings started to live in a village. The person was called headman but he was not given the authority to obey his orders Each member of the village had not even a single feeling of being dominated. All of them used to believe that they were all headmen. Certainly, the headman did have respect in the village. If something needs to be done, it is the headman who would stand at first. Hence, he was a ray of hope to those people who were in need. He was in fact a model of good behaviours who would teach the rest of the people to work hard to provide generosity.

A headman would also teach them to keep control over their sexual appetites work hard in the garden and take frequent baths in the rivers. Up to this time, the essayist believes that there was no possession of the land. For him, a kind of communism existed at this time. Slowly and gradually, people started to have possession of things, all the people were allowed to own their weapons but they were not supposed to use them for their individual benefits. A person who misused his weapon would be punished even though there was an absence of criminal justice systems.

With the passing of time, reciprocity took another form which was known as redistribution of food. The headman was the real distributor who would offer the feast. Since the capacity of offering the feast started to determine the headman. People started to accept that there could be headmen if they offer the feasts. Among those headmen, there will be mumis who was the big man in the village who would offer the best and greatest feast.

So, a sense competition came there to be Mumis. So, the Mumis had to eat less food and meat so that he would be able to offer feast and preserve his dignity. The big man slowly started to help the people in time of need but a different rule occurred in the society. According to this, Mumis now called chief would not have to go to the field and work hard. Instead, the people would work in their field. The people would even distinguish the food for the chiefs so that they would ask with him at the time of need.

Analysis of Life without Chiefs

In “Life without Chiefs”, by Marvin Harris, Harris “traces the evolution of political leadership”. The types of leaders mentioned were headmen, big men, and chiefs. Harris associates headmen “with small hunting and gathering societies marked by reciprocal exchange and big men with slightly larger horticultural societies that employ redistributive exchange”. Chiefs had similar societies with the big men but their population was a bit larger and could inherit their position. Marvin Harris shows in this chapter how everything is connected and how leaders evolved to become what they are today.

Small populations had a rule of reciprocity exchange. It was all about sharing in society because “chance played a great role” in getting food and some day's people needed help. “So the best way for them to provide for their inevitable rainy day was to be generous”. Anthropologist Richard Gould said, “The greater the amount of risk, the greater the extent of sharing”.

As people share, they don’t calculate exactly what they expect back. For example, something more modern might be giving presents and gifts. Nobody expects to get back the same amount of what they gave. This reciprocal exchange has one expectation which is “that our generosity will be acknowledged with an expression of thanks”. Anthropologist Robert Dentan discovered in Central Malaysia that “saying thank you is very rude because it suggests that one has calculated the gift and that one did not expect the donor to be so generous”.

Also, in reference to “Christmas in Kalahari”, Richard Lee realizes that the Bushmen didn’t praise his gift of the ox because then he would think of the rest as inferior as and lower than him. “We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody”.

Headmen didn’t have the power to make people obey their orders. “They have no formal authority and can only persuade, never command”. The headman’s job is basically to lead by example. “If something needs to be done, it is the headman who starts doing it. He works harder than anyone else”. Freeloaders were people who sat home all day while others got them food and did the work needed. To punish them, society used sorcerers.

“The task of identifying these evildoers falls to a group’s shamans, who remain responsive to public opinion during their divinatory trances”. Another form of exchange was redistribution which was when people gave food and other things to the main figure and then divided in portions and given out. Whoever “redistributed the most food etc. would become the big man” and would receive status. The mini feast was created which was a competition between prestigious figures, and whoever lost “suffered great humiliation and fall from mamahood was immediate”.

The chief status was viewed as an “office, a sacred trust with the rules of hereditary succession and the dominion was no longer a small, autonomous village but a large political community”. Chiefs were more like kings than headmen and big men. They had certain clothes and ornaments they wore and commoners couldn’t put a chief’s head lower than theirs. The chief had “exclusive rights” to granaries that stored food for droughts etc.

Chiefdoms evolved into states than into empires etc. till what we have now. “It is essential that we understand the past before we can create the best possible future”. Studying the past will help societies to learn from what systems had a bad effect and create better ones so we can “survive as a species”.

Marvin Harris' Life without Chiefs brought to light a great phenomenon that we may not be aware of. Harris claimed that for about 98 per cent of our existence as a species, most of our ancestors were hunting and gathering bands containing no more than 50 people. He continues by showing how effectively these bands functioned without the everyday norms of judges, policemen and many others whom our society greatly relies on.

In Harris' piece, he says the reason that these small groups were functioning so effectively was because of their principle of reciprocity. As he states, "In reciprocal exchange, people do not specify how much or exactly what they expected to get back or when they expect it back." He gives an example of another ethnographer Robert Dentan who worked in Semi of Central Malaysia, where it is impolite to say Thank you for the meat provided by another hunter. It is impolite because it suggests, "That one has calculated the gift and that one did not expect the donor to be so generous." This is so different from our present time where it is impolite not to say thank you for anything given to us.

This change makes us think that it had to do with the changes from headman, to the big man and then finally to chiefs. The village man's quest was not one of power; his only job was to lead by example. They gave more of what they had to everyone else and it then became a competition between many village men who can give more generously and thus big men arose. Big men had also struggled with competitors for generosity and the reciprocity was changed when chiefs arose. Not only did the chiefs have dominion over multiple villages, but the villagers were now giving to them instead of the reverse.

"From peaceful origins, humans created and mounted a wild beast that ate continents. This line sums it up, the rise of political systems has changed the way we operated as a society and cannot be reversed. However, I pose the question; can we ever go back to the times of Village men? Would it change the quest for power and greed that we now possess?