Cannibals and Kings Read online

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1991

  Copyright © 1977 by Marvin Harris

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., in October 1977.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Harris, Marvin, 1927-

  Cannibals and kings.

  1. Social evolution. 2. Culture—Origin.

  3. Man—Influence of environment. 4. Food supply.

  I. Title.

  [GN358.H37 1978] 301.2 90-55701

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80123-4

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. Culture and Nature

  2. Murders in Eden

  3. The Origin of Agriculture

  4. The Origin of War

  5. Proteins and the Fierce People

  6. The Origin of Male Supremacy and of the Oedipus Complex

  7. The Origin of Pristine States

  8. The Pre-Columbian States of Mesoamerica

  9. The Cannibal Kingdom

  10. The Lamb of Mercy

  11. Forbidden Flesh

  12. The Origin of the Sacred Cow

  13. The Hydraulic Trap

  14. The Origin of Capitalism

  15. The Industrial Bubble

  Epilogue and Moral Soliloquy

  Acknowledgments, References, and Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Introduction

  For centuries the Western world has been comforted by the belief that material progress will never end. We take our cars, telephones, and central heating as proof that living is far easier for us today than it was for our grandparents. And although we recognize that progress may be slow and uneven, with temporary setbacks, we feel that living will, on balance, be a lot easier in the future than it is now.

  Scientific theories, for the most part formulated a hundred years ago, nourish this belief. From the vantage point of Victorian scientists, the evolution of culture seemed to be a pilgrimage up a steep mountain from the top of which civilized peoples could look down at various levels of savagery and barbarism yet to be passed by “lower” cultures. The Victorians exaggerated the material poverty of the so-called savages and at the same time inflated the benefits of industrial “civilization.” They pictured the old stone age as a time of great fear and insecurity, when people spent their days ceaselessly searching for food and their nights huddled about fires in comfortless caves besieged by saber-toothed tigers. Only when the secret of how to plant crops was discovered did our “savage” ancestors have enough leisure time to settle down in villages and build comfortable dwellings. And only then could they store surplus food and have time to think and experiment with new ideas. This in turn supposedly led to the invention of writing, to cities, to organized governments and the flowering of art and science. Then came the steam engine, ushering in a new and more rapid phase of progress, the industrial revolution, with its miraculous cornucopia of mass-produced labor-saving machines and life-enhancing technology.

  It isn’t easy to overcome this kind of indoctrination. Nevertheless, growing numbers of people can’t help feeling that industrial society has a hollow core and that despite media images of fun-filled leisure hours our progeny will have to work harder and harder to hold on to the few luxuries we now enjoy. The great industrial cornucopia has not only been polluting the earth with wastes and poisons; it has also been spewing forth increasingly shoddy, costly, and defective goods and services.

  My purpose in this book is to replace the old onwards-and-upwards Victorian view of progress with a more realistic account of cultural evolution. What is happening to today’s standard of living has happened in the past. Our culture is not the first that technology has failed. Nor is it the first to reach its limits of growth. The technologies of earlier cultures failed again and again, only to be replaced by new technologies. And limits of growth have been reached and transcended only to be reached and transcended again. Much of what we think of as contemporary progress is actually a regaining of standards that were widely enjoyed during prehistoric times.

  Stone age populations lived healthier lives than did most of the people who came immediately after them: during Roman times there was more sickness in the world than ever before, and even in early nineteenth-century England the life expectancy for children was probably not very different from what it was 20,000 years earlier. Moreover, stone age hunters worked fewer hours for their sustenance than do typical Chinese and Egyptian peasants—or, despite their unions, modern-day factory workers. As for amenities such as good food, entertainment, and aesthetic pleasures, early hunters and plant collectors enjoyed luxuries that only the richest of today’s Americans can afford. For two days’ worth of trees, lakes, and clear air, the modern-day executive works five. Nowadays, whole families toil and save for thirty years to gain the privilege of seeing a few square feet of grass outside their windows. And they are the privileged few. Americans say, “Meat makes the meal,” and their diet is rich (some say too rich) in animal proteins, but two-thirds of the people alive today are involuntary vegetarians. In the stone age, everyone maintained a high-protein, low-starch diet. And the meat wasn’t frozen or pumped full of antibiotics and artificial color.

  But I haven’t written this book to talk down modern American and European standards of living. No one can deny that we are better off today than were our great-grandparents in the last century. And no one can deny that science and technology have helped to improve the diet, health, longevity, and creature comforts of hundreds of millions of people. In matters such as contraception, security against natural calamities, and ease of transportation and communication, we have obviously surpassed even the most affluent of earlier societies. The question uppermost in my mind is not whether the gains of the last 150 years are real, but whether they are permanent. Can the recent industrial cornucopia be looked upon as the tip of a single continuously rising curve of material and spiritual uplift or is it the latest bubble-like protuberance on a curve that slopes down as often as it slopes up? I think the second view is more in accord with the evidence and explanatory principles of modern anthropology.

  My aim is to show the relationship between material and spiritual well-being and the cost/benefits of various systems for increasing production and controlling population growth. In the past, irresistible reproductive pressures arising from the lack of safe and effective means of contraception led recurrently to the intensification of production. Such intensification has always led to environmental depletion, which in general results in new systems of production—each with a characteristic form of institutionalized violence, drudgery, exploitation, or cruelty. Thus reproductive pressure, intensification, and environmental depletion would appear to provide the key for understanding the evolution of family organization, property relations, political economy, and religious beliefs, including dietary preferences and food taboos. Modern contraceptive and abortion techniques enter this picture as potentially decisive new elements, since they remove the excruciating penalties associated with all preexisting techniques for coping directly with reproductive pressures through fertility control. But the new technology of contraception and abortion may have come too late. Contemporary state societies are committed to the intensification of the industrial mode of production. We have only begun to pay the penalties for the environmental depletions associated with this new round of intensification, and no one can predict what new constraints will be needed to transcend the l
imits of growth of the industrial order.

  I am aware that my theories of historical determinism are likely to provoke an unfavorable reaction. Some readers will be offended by the casual links I point to among cannibalism, religions of love and mercy, vegetarianism, infanticide, and the cost/benefits of production. As a result, I may be accused of seeking to imprison the human spirit within a closed system of mechanical relationships. But my intention is exactly the opposite. That a blind form of determinism has ruled the past does not mean that it must rule the future.

  Before going any further, I should clarify the meaning of the word “determinism.” In the context of twentieth-century science, one no longer speaks of cause and effect in the sense of a mechanical one-to-one relationship between dependent and independent variables. In subatomic physics Heisenberg’s “indeterminacy principle,” substituting cause-and-effect probabilities about micro-particles for cause-and-effect certainties, has long held sway. Since the paradigm “one exception falsifies the rule” has lost its reign in physics, I, for one, have no intention of imposing it on cultural phenomena. By a deterministic relationship among cultural phenomena, I mean merely that similar variables under similar conditions tend to give rise to similar consequences.

  Since I believe that the relationship between material processes and moral preferences is one of probabilities and similarities rather than certainties and identities, I have no difficulty in believing both that history is determined and that human beings have the capacity to exercise moral choice and free will. In fact, I insist on the possibility that improbable historical events involving the unpredictable reversal of normal cause-and-effect relationships between material processes and values can occur and that therefore we are all responsible for our contribution to history. But to argue that we human beings have the capacity to make culture and history conform to standards of our own free choice is not to say that history is actually the expression of that capacity. Far from it. As I shall show, cultures on the whole have evolved along parallel and convergent paths which are highly predictable from a knowledge of the processes of production, reproduction, intensification, and depletion. And I include here both abhorred and cherished rituals and beliefs throughout the world.

  In my opinion, free will and moral choice have had virtually no significant effect upon the directions taken thus far by evolving systems of social life. If I am correct, it behooves those who are concerned about protecting human dignity from the threat of mechanical determinism to join me in pondering the question: why has social life up to now consisted overwhelmingly of predictable rather than unpredictable arrangements? I am convinced that one of the greatest existing obstacles to the exercise of free choice on behalf of achieving the improbable goals of peace, equality, and affluence is the failure to recognize the material evolutionary processes that account for the prevalence of wars, inequality, and poverty. As a result of the studied neglect of the science of culture, the world is full of moralists insisting that they have freely willed what they were unwittingly forced to want, while by not understanding the odds against free choice, millions who would be free have delivered themselves into new forms of bondage. To change social life for the better, one must begin with the knowledge of why it usually changes for the worse. That is why I consider ignorance of the causal factors in cultural evolution and disregard of the odds against a desired outcome to be forms of moral duplicity.

  1

  Culture and Nature

  The explorers sent out during Europe’s great age of discovery were slow to grasp the global pattern of customs and institutions. In some regions—Australia, the Arctic, the southern tips of South America and Africa—they found groups still living much like Europe’s own long-forgotten stone age ancestors: bands of twenty or thirty people, sprinkled across vast territories, constantly on the move, living entirely by hunting animals and collecting wild plants. These hunter-collectors appeared to be members of a rare and endangered species. In other regions—the forests of eastern North America, the jungles of South America, and East Asia—they found denser populations, inhabiting more or less permanent villages, based on farming and consisting of perhaps one or two large communal structures, but here too the weapons and tools were relics of prehistory.

  Along the banks of the Amazon and the Mississippi, and on the islands of the Pacific, the villages were bigger, sometimes containing a thousand or more inhabitants. Some were organized into confederacies verging on statehood. Although the Europeans exaggerated their “savagery,” the majority of these village communities collected enemy heads as trophies, roasted their prisoners of war alive, and consumed human flesh in ritual feasts. The fact that the “civilized” Europeans also tortured people—in witchcraft trials, for example—and that they were not against exterminating the populations of whole cities should be kept in mind (even if they were squeamish about eating one another).

  Elsewhere, of course, the explorers encountered fully developed states and empires, headed by despots and ruling classes, and defended by standing armies. It was these great empires, with their cities, monuments, palaces, temples, and treasures, that had lured all the Marco Polos and Columbuses across the oceans and deserts in the first place. There was China—the greatest empire in the world, a vast, sophisticated realm whose leaders scorned the “red-faced barbarians,” supplicants from puny kingdoms beyond the pale of the civilized world. And there was India—a land where cows were venerated and the unequal burdens of life were apportioned according to what each soul had merited in its previous incarnation. And then there were the native American states and empires, worlds unto themselves, each with its distinctive arts and religions: the Incas, with their great stone fortresses, suspension bridges, ever-normal granaries, and state-controlled economy; the Aztecs, with their bloodthirsty gods fed from human hearts and their incessant search for fresh sacrifices. And there were the Europeans themselves, with their own exotic qualities: waging warfare in the name of a Prince of Peace, compulsively buying and selling to make profits, powerful beyond their numbers because of a cunning mastery of mechanical crafts and engineering.

  What did this pattern signify? Why did some peoples abandon hunting and plant collecting as a way of life while others retained it? And among those who adopted farming, why did some rest content with village life while others moved steadily closer to statehood? And among those who organized themselves into states, why did some achieve empires and others not? Why did some worship cows while others fed human hearts to cannibal gods? Is human history told not by one but by ten billion idiots—the play of chance and passion and nothing more? I think not. I think there is an intelligible process that governs the maintenance of common cultural forms, initiates changes, and determines their transformations along parallel or divergent paths.

  The heart of this process is the tendency to intensify production. Intensification—the investment of more soil, water, minerals, or energy per unit of time or area—is in turn a recurrent response to threats against living standards. In earliest times such threats arose mainly from changes in climate and migrations of people and animals. In later times competition between states became the major stimulus. Regardless of its immediate cause, intensification is always counterproductive. In the absence of technological change, it leads inevitably to the depletion of the environment and the lowering of the efficiency of production since the increased effort sooner or later must be applied to more remote, less reliable, and less bountiful animals, plants, soils, minerals, and sources of energy. Declining efficiency in turn leads to low living standards—precisely the opposite of the desired result. But this process does not simply end with everybody getting less food, shelter, and other necessities in return for more work. As living standards decline, successful cultures invent new and more efficient means of production which sooner or later again lead to the depletion of the natural environment.

  Why do people try to solve their economic problems by intensifying production? Theoretically, the easiest w
ay to achieve a high-quality diet, a vigorous long life free of toil and drudgery, is not to increase production but to reduce population. If for some reason beyond human control—an unfavorable shift of climate, say—the supply of natural resources per capita is cut in half, people need not try to compensate by working twice as hard. Instead, they could cut their population in half. Or, I should say, they could do this were it not for one large problem.

  Since heterosexual activity is a genetically mandated relationship upon which the survival of our species depends, it is no easy task to thin out the human “crop.” In preindustrial times the effective regulation of population itself involved lowering the standard of living. For example, if population is to be reduced by avoiding heterosexual intercourse, a group’s standard of living can scarcely be said to have been maintained or enhanced. Similarly, if the fecundity of the group is to be lowered by midwives jumping on a woman’s stomach to kill the fetus and often the mothers as well, the survivors may eat better but their life expectancy will not be improved. Actually, the most widely used method of population control during much of human history was probably some form of female infanticide. Although the psychological costs of killing or starving one’s infant daughters can be dulled by culturally defining them as non-persons (just as modern pro-abortionists, of whom I am one, define fetuses as non-infants), the material costs of nine months of pregnancy are not easily written off. It is safe to assume that most people who practice infanticide would rather not see their infants die. But the alternatives—drastically lowering the nutritional, sexual, and health standards of the entire group—have usually been judged to be even more undesirable, at least in pre-state societies.

  What I am getting at is that population regulation was often a costly if not traumatic procedure and a source of individual stress, just as Thomas Malthus suggested it would have to be for all future time (until he was proven wrong by the invention of the rubber condom). It is this stress—or reproductive pressure, as is might more aptly be called—that accounts for the recurrent tendency of pre-state societies to intensify production as a means of protecting or enhancing general living standards. Were it not for the severe costs involved in controlling reproduction, our species might have remained forever organized into small, relatively peaceful, egalitarian bands of hunter-collectors. But the lack of effective and benign methods of population control rendered this mode of life unstable. Reproductive pressures predisposed our stone age ancestors to resort to intensification as a response to declining numbers of big-game animals caused by climatic changes at the end of the last ice age. Intensification of the hunting and collecting mode of production in turn set the stage for the adoption of agriculture, which led in turn to heightened competition among groups, an increase in warfare, and the evolution of the state—but I am getting ahead of the story.