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From Autonomous Villages to the State: an Irresistible Trend in the Grand Sweep of Human History the 53Rd Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture

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From Autonomous Villages to the State: an Irresistible Trend in the Grand Sweep of Human History the 53Rd Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture From Autonomous Villages to the State: An Irresistible Trend in the Grand Sweep of Human History The 53rd Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture Robert Carneiro, Ph.D. Curator of Introduction by Warren Robbins, founder that he was selected to be the speaker this of the Robbins Center for Cross Cultural evening. I don’t believe in people taking lots of Anthropology, Communication: time on introductions of speakers, so I will give American Museum him all the time that he deserves. Bob … of Natural History The Center for Cross Cultural Communication is just a fancy name for general semantics. But Robert Carneiro (speaking without notes): as the predecessor for the museum, it enabled me to put together a board of advisors which Thank you very much Warren. included people like Margaret Mead, Joseph As far as I know, Leslie White never cited Campbell, Leslie White, and Ben Shahn, Korzybski in print, but the two had a very great people from all the various social sciences and interest in the same thing, namely words. the arts. That was the platform from which I was White worked on what underlies language, the able to launch the Museum of African Art, which symbol. He wrote an article in 1939 titled “The I then turned over after fifteen years to the Symbol: The Origin and Basis of Human Smithsonian, relieving me of various responsi- Behavior.” [See page 65] White was clear in bilities so I could come down here and partici- his definition of a symbol: something in which pate in something like this [lecture] this evening. meaning does not inhere, but is assigned to it It is a pleasure for me to do so because arbitrarily by those who use it. White saw the Robert Carneiro and I were classmates at the symbol as the means by which human beings University of Michigan years and years ago. But were able to communicate effectively and we didn’t really know each other. We lived in the ultimately erect the structure that we know of same residence hall and were peripherally as the state. His view of words was thus aware of each other’s existence, but we didn’t essentially positive, constructive. chum around together. I wish we had. Korzybski, on the other hand, often Carneiro was certainly a product of the looked at the negative side of words, pointing University of Michigan. At this time, Harvard is to the fact that people often thought of words beginning to be called the Michigan of the east. as things in and of themselves and didn’t (laughter) I was testing that out because that’s a realize they were only symbols. A lot of the standard joke in Ann Arbor, so I wanted to see mental difficulties that people get themselves what the response would be in New York City. into, he said, are the result of this failure to In any case, Bob has B.A. and M.A. see the symbol for what it is. degrees, and a Ph.D., in anthropology. Well, the If you look in the back at the index of first one was in political science, but he soon Science and Sanity, you will not find the word learned better and ended up as a cultural evolution, but you will find the word or the anthropologist in which capacity we know him term time-binding. In fact, here is how and know him well, and he’s known very well Korzybski defined it: “Human beings differ within the institution in which he is speaking from animals in the fact that each generation tonight. He has had a very broad academic can start where the former generation left career, which I won’t recount. He’s had many off.” Translating this into anthropological assignments and field trips overseas. terminology, time-binding is what? It is He has written on a wide variety of cumulation. Anthropologists are tired of subjects—the ones that you might expect from repeating that “culture is cumulative.” such a scholar, but even one on baseball. He Cumulation is simply the addition of the new has written many, many monographs on a along with the retention of the old. This, of variety of subjects. Some of that will be reflected, course, is one of the major features of I’m sure, in what he has to say this evening. evolution; that is, it consists of building larger When the call went out for and more complex structures by taking the recommendations for a speaker for this year’s elemental pieces of it, building them up, and Korzybski lecture, I submitted his name with aggregating them. Evolution can then be seen great pleasure, and now with great gratification as consisting largely of this cumulation of From Villages to the State 15 things. And that is true of political evolution as Here, I thought, we had something to work well as evolution of other aspects of culture. with. From the point of view of political When I first went into the field among the development, the outstanding feature of Kuikuru in central Brazil in 1953, if there was Amazonia is that it consists of an area of a recognized theory of the origin of state at extensive, unbounded, agricultural land. all, it was what I call the “automatic” theory Almost any part of the forest can be felled and which had been more or less proposed by agricultural crops, especially manioc, can be Old World archeologists like V. Gordon grown very successfully. That meant that when Childe and Leonard Woolley. According to there was warfare between adjacent villages, this theory, once agriculture came on the the defeated villages need not stay in place scene about 10,000 years ago, humans and be subjugated by the victor, but could flee could produce a surplus of food above to a safer location and establish a new village subsistence needs. Thus individuals were there just about as well as before. able to be divorced from primary food Population growth, of course, was production and began specializing in occurring in both areas, slowly and gradually. Until we had ceramics, weaving, metallurgy, the It operated by a process whereby individual priesthood, and so on. Somehow, villages were growing to a certain size and agriculture, automatically (the steps were not really then splitting, growing and splitting, so what it was spelled out), this gave rise to the state. was occurring was the proliferation of villages. Well, the group that I worked with in But in Amazonia, villages spaced themselves impossible to central Brazil, the Kuikuru, practiced slash- out, at arm’s length, so to speak, because expect the and-burn agriculture, with manioc as its there was plenty of land. staple crop. Kuikuru agriculture turned out to If we look at the coast of Peru, where state to be more productive per unit of land or per Andean states first arose, what we see is arise. unit of labor than the agriculture of the Inca. something quite different. There are several Yet, whereas the Kuikuru lived in a simple dozen short rivers that come down from the village of about 145 people, completely Andes and flow into the Pacific. These rivers autonomous politically, the Inca comprised a flow through probably the world’s driest desert. vast empire of some ten million people over a So there were river valleys with very fertile soil very large area with a very complex culture close to the river, and then sheer desert on but with a system of agriculture that was less either side. At the headwaters, there were productive than that of the Kuikuru. mountains, at the other end of the river, the Obviously, the automatic theory was wrong, sea, and on either side, desert. Now, the or at least incomplete. Sure, agriculture was agricultural villages that existed there necessary for the state to come into being. autonomously, from an early period, engaged Until we had agriculture, it was impossible to in warfare from time to time, just as expect the state to arise. But something more Amazonian villages did. The results, however, than that had to be involved. What was it? were strikingly different. One of the ingredients I thought was at At first, as long as there was enough land, the base of the formation of states, beginning what occurred was a process of fight and flight. with simple autonomous villages, was But it wasn’t long before these villages found warfare. In those days, anthropologists themselves with no more room for expansion, tended to look askance at warfare as having and so defeated villages had to stay put and be played a constructive role. War, after all, was subjugated by the victorious one. This meant nasty and unpalatable. For instance, in those that for the first time, we see the creation of days, it was thought that the Maya had multi-village chiefdoms. The chiefdom was the developed completely without warfare, and first supra-village form of political organization you frequently found statements about the ever to occur in the world. “peaceful” Maya. This, of course, has since Human culture goes back perhaps two been disproved, first by the discovery of the million years, and yet it wasn’t until around Bonampak murals in southern Mexico, but 5000 B.C. in Mesopotamia that we get, for the since then by a lot more epigraphic and other first time, multi-village aggregates. In the evidence of warfare. So warfare was involved various valleys along the coast of Peru, the in state formation. But warfare was prevalent first small chiefdoms were emerging, although in Amazonia, too, and yet had not given rise somewhat later.
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