Big Men, Chiefs, and Cultural and Historical Comparison

In two posts over the past week (“Not the War of 1812” and “2006 and 1930”) I addressed two recent examples from news and commentary magazines (Time and The Nation) of comparisons between the present moment and events and earlier historical contexts.

Both articles I commented on share a common flaw, a sort of two-step error in identification. First, both authors do identify interesting parallels between certain aspects of the present and particular historical moments, but go beyond this to imply an identity between the contexts, at least in all essential or important regards. Second, they assume that what happened then will happen now and in the near future, or at the least that what happened then is a reliable guide to what’s likely to happen now.

This is an understandable approach. It would perhaps be useful and satisfying to be able to identify historical or cross-cultural situations which highly parallel our current context sufficiently to offer a sort of skeleton key to discern the short term course of events beforehand.

The problem with this is actually fairly simple. Social and historical contexts are unique (i.e. involving a specific set of individuals doing a specific set of things in specific spaces) and simply too complex to discern the sorts of total parallels necessary to accurately prognosticate the future through historical analysis or ethnological comparison.

This doesn’t mean that historical or cross-cultural comparison is not useful or insightful. At best, though, such comparison yields insights into general tendencies and associations – it may yield a useful awareness of likely possibilities if comparison is carefully defined and delimited. Where the comparative approach works best is in lining up commonalities and differences across two or more contexts in an attempt to discern recurring associations between similar aspects of phenomena. In pursuit of this, comparison works best not through any attempt to identify contexts which parallel one another in a total sense, but actually through comparing situations that are both similar and different in important regards (where difference allows for more clear discernment of enduring associations, even in contexts which otherwise differ).

As a side note, useful historical or sociocultural comparison pursues nomothetic generalizations, the identification of associated patterns which tend to co-occur across a variety of settings. As such, it is not opposed to idiographic scholarly approaches which focus on careful description and analysis of particular settings. Instead, careful comparison depends on thorough-going idiographic work having been done on the contexts under comparison. Further, neither idiographic nor comparative nomothetic scholarship are exclusive to any style of scholarly work – either can be conducted using any number of data collection and analysis techniques.

An example of a useful ethnological comparison can start to be discerned in Marshall Sahlins’ classic essay “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief.” In this article, Sahlins presents an important distinction in political organization between the island cultures of Melanesia and of Polynesia (with regard to Melanesia, it seems apparent to me that he’s mainly talking about island Melanesia and coastal New Guinea, but not particularly the interior areas of New Guinea – at least when it comes to identifying key cultural features). While also laying out important social parallels between the two cultural areas, he notes the predominance of “Big Man” political organization (characterized by small polities, and personal influence but not authority of political leaders – the “Big Men”) in Melanesia and of chiefdoms in Polynesia (characterized by larger polities, with chiefs coming into political offices with both power and authority). He doesn’t really make an argument about causation in the article, but he does also note one other suggestive distinction between the two areas, specifically that Melanesian culture tends to be associated with smaller resource bases (smaller islands or interior valleys largely isolated from others by the rugged terrain in the interior of New Guinea). This in turn would mean smaller surpluses that could be extracted and concentrated to form a permanent political elite that can effectively maintain its power and authority through things like full time armed cadres of supporters.

The sort of comparison started by Sahlins in that article can, I think, be usefully extended to make the association between size of resource base and scale of political development clearer if the comparison is fleshed out via more recognition between important cultural differences within Melanesia that still remain associated with the factors identified by Sahlins. In many ways, coastal and island Melanesia is more like Polynesia than like the interior of New Guinea. Linguistically, Austronesian languages are prevalent throughout the coastal and island areas of both Melanesia and Polynesia, in contrast to the prevalence of non-Austronesian languages in interior Melanesia. In terms of subsistence patterns, coastal and island Melanesia and Polynesia emphasize marine resources to provide plentiful protein, alongside cultivation of a variety of tuber and orchard crops and domesticated pigs. Interior Melanesia emphasizes much the same crops and the pigs, but instead of heavy utilization of marine resources, farming is supplemented with gathering and the hunting of terrestrial game animals – arguably providing a somewhat more meager protein base. Interior Melanesian societies are often much more male dominated, with a fratriarchal form of male domination, than is the case with either coastal / island Melanesia or Polynesia. (Whether fratriarchal male domination is related to lower protein resources in tropical forest zones in New Guinea or the Amazon basin was part of what the “Protein Debates” in anthropological scholarship of the 1970s was all about.) Despite major cultural differences between interior and coastal Melanesia, the association between size of resource base and “Big Man” or similar forms of political organizations holds in both portions of Melanesia, and is in fact strengthened by awareness of the important differences.

Cross-cultural or historical comparison is a useful tool in discerning patterns that endure across multiple settings. What we should not realistically expect to encounter are contexts that parallel one another in all essential respects (and even if we did, it would say little or nothing of use about general patterns that operate beyond those two specific settings).

2006 and 1930

In the April 30, 2007 issue of The Nation (pp. 16 – 20), Lawrence Cooper argues for what he calls “The Coming Party Realignment.” He bases this on a historical parallel with the early 1930s. In 1930, with voters newly disaffected from the effects of the Great Depression and seeing President Hoover seeming to do nothing to help, Democrats picked up a substantial number of seats in Congress. In 1932, the slight realignment of Congress was followed by a sort of political tidal wave, with Democrats gaining overwhelming control of Congress and picking up the presidency with FDR’s first term. Cooper sees 2006’s slight realignment of Congress to the Democrats as parallel to 1930, to be followed in 2008 by a parallel to 1932. He sees the causes of the 1930 and 2006 shifts as parallel as well – public anxiety over economic crisis. “For generations to come, American historians will doubtless be comparing the period 1930 – 1936 to 2006 – 2012 as years of crisis for capitalism.”

I find Cooper’s article interesting – and I’d like to think he’s right that a political tidal wave will largely sweep the Republicans away in 2008, though I’m not confident that will happen, and while he does point out some interesting parallels, I’m skeptical of his totalizing comparison of the two eras.

In both the 1930 and 2006 mid-term elections, the shift of seats in Congress from Republicans to Democrats represented a sort of informal referendum on Presidents Hoover and Bush, indicating voter dissatisfaction with them. But the causes of voter displeasure are not so parallel as Cooper presents (and the consequences in 2008 likewise need not parallel 1932). The election of 1930 represented displeasure and anxiety over the Depression as Cooper argues. While economic anxiety (and perhaps some disgust over the handling of things like Hurricane Katrina) may have been part of the backdrop for voters’ motivations in voting as they did (and more on economic anxiety in a moment), the primary issue in the 2006 election was clearly the Iraq War. Barring an extreme downturn in the economy, Iraq will probably be the main issue again in 2008, with economic anxiety, health care, and the Bush Administration’s various scandals as important, but distinctly secondary campaign issues. If things in Iraq continue as they are now, 2008 may see major victories for Democrats, but not really for the reasons Cooper argues.

1930 and 2006 are both periods of economic anxiety for many middle class Americans, and Americans in general. They have that in common, but 1930 and 2006 aren’t otherwise particularly comparable. Today, we see crisis and much anxiety for some workers, but capitalism is not in crisis, whereas in 1930 both workers and capitalism were in crisis.

Further the degree of crisis and anxiety, even for workers, is quite different in degree and kind. Middle class workers are rightly anxious today, about not going deeply into debt, about paying for a top college education for their children, about their job being outsourced and having to take a lower paying job, about their home losing value in a housing bubble, in some cases about having to shift from owning a home to renting. In 1930, many middle class workers were worried about having any sort of job and about whether there would be food in the short or long term. Things are serious for the American middle class today (and even more serious for those below the middle class), and that will likely have political repercussions, but it’s no Great Depression.

Not the War of 1812

In a recent column in Time magazine (March 26, 2007, pp. 55 – 56), Richard Brookhiser makes a problematic comparison between current opposition to the war in Iraq by Democrats in Congress and opposition to war with Britain during the War of 1812 by Federalists in Congress.

Federalists opposed the movement to war from the beginning, and in 1814 organized a convention to oppose the war. Before their positions could be presented, the news was in of U.S. victory in the Battle of New Orleans and of a peace treaty agreeable to both sides. The Federalists, tainted by “defeatism and treason,” quickly faded into irrelevancy. Brookhiser’s concluding lesson, “The antiwar Federalists had the courage of their convictions, playing a weak hand – they were always a congressional minority – boldly. But their overthrow was a lesson in practical politics. If you stick your neck out too far, it may get broken. Today’s Democrats are wise to debate and discuss.” In other words, Democrats need to beware of speaking too strongly on Iraq lest they go the way of the Federalists in 1815.

I thank Brookhiser for writing a provocative piece. The War of 1812 is not a comparative frame I would have likely thought of on my own. But that’s largely because the comparison doesn’t fit so well. There is some commonality – both involve parties opposite the president expressing some opposition to a war started on dubious pretexts. Beyond that, though, are all the differences. As Brookhiser himself writes, the Federalists were always a minority in this period, and, as he also writes, they had been waning in power (to a far greater extent than the Democrats in the 1990s I would add) for quite some time before the start of the War of 1812.

The two wars are quite different as well. The pretext for war in Iraq seems far more questionable to many Americans today that the pretext for war in 1812 had (there had actually been some British violations of American sovereignty on the seas in that case). Currently, there is not even the remote possibility that the war in Iraq might end in conquest of the U.S. (a less than remote possibility in the War of 1812), and so it hardly seems “treasonable” to simply be opposed to continued involvement in the quagmire of Iraq. Further, in the current Iraq war there is no realistic possibility of anything that could be reasonably termed “victory” anytime soon.

In short, the comparison of the current situation with the War of 1812 doesn’t indicate any clear lessons. Brookhiser’s arguments seem to me to be an attempt to dissuade strong critique of the war (which might not be all that necessary – another difference is that many Democrats don’t have the strength of their convictions that the Federalists did) at a time when no good arguments for continuing the war remain.

At the same time, Broohiser’s column is one of several writings and commentaries I’ve encountered recently that attempt to discern lessons for the present via comparison with supposedly comparable previous set of events. (I’ll discuss another example in my next post.) This seems to reflect a feeling by many that in our current context, we’re on the verge of some significant change, with a look towards history to try to discern what such change might be.