- Location
- Covenant of the Councils
Hey guys! I'm new to Sufficient Velocity, so I apologize if I posted in the wrong forum.
I've been thinking about a type of alternative "family" system as opposed to say, matrifocality or patriarchical systems. To summarize: "What if the concept, that friends are your true family, developed into an actual kinship system among hunter-gatherers settling down, i.e. transitioning from agriculture?"
Now, we're aware of course, that "Friends are your family" is a very recent invention. It has its origins in the deterioration of the nuclear family in the United States, and certainly it's not a dominant kinship system at all; now with that out of the way, I'd like to explain how I ended up at such a system for my fictional culture:
First off, let us start with some background. I'm currently working on a Green Antarctica inspired TL. It's name is "Oops! All Blue Antarctica!" - I might crosspost from alternatehistory.com here, at some point. The mission is try to tend towards on the realistic side, and even veer into the opposite in certain, but major areas. If you don't know what Green Antarctica is: it's an excellently entertaining ASB on alternatehistory.com about: "what if Antarctica was warm and ice-free? Would humans settle? How would society develop?"
(Note: The following 1,500 words, are well, lengthy, so if you want to skip - scroll down to the next part in bold.)
What do I mean by opposite? As many people have thought, in replies in the Green Antarctica thread - would the Antarcticans really be that depraved and horrible? It seems like it goes against history, that in extreme conditions and times of hardship, people actually work together. They don't just start killing each other off. What if the first Antarctic states were actually socialist and friendly, compared to the traumatizing secret societies of the Yag? Where all Antarcticans are brothers and they work for the greater good, rather than driving a knife into each other's backs and [REDACTED] each other's corpses?
I think that there is a degree of truth to both perspectives. Certainly people worked together, but it would be remiss to not say that people did not take advantage of each other, that they did not steal. In the Bronze Age Collapse, there was a lot of war. We'd be also contradicting history if we didn't say that there were any wars.
You may be asking, "but what's that got to do with your philofocal system?". My ultimate goal is to nudge the Antarcticans, at least some of them, into eventually ending up with a socialistic system. Now, I don't think the final system will be that socialist. It may resemble it on the surface, but when you look inside - there may be a whole lot of coercion - like the Tawatinsuyu. I'd be happy if I ended up with a system like the Tawatinsuyu.
So, let's think about the first hunter gatherers settling in Antarctica. In the climate map I've worked out so far, the first areas they will be inhabiting, will be large islands covered in a Valdivian-type rainy forest, with an oceanic climate more akin to Reykjavik at Iceland. Once they've got past the initial challenges (such as a six month long night-winter), the environment will be bountiful enough to support very high population densities for hunter-gatherers wanting to settle (but not enough to support anything like, for example, Catalhoyuk or Cucuteni-Trypilia).
Our first hunter gatherers will come from the proto-Yahgan population living in Tierra del Fuego. According to my research, it appears that the Yahgan are of the "composite band" variety. I'm not clear on what composite band actually means. It seems to indicate that they could be arranged into many different structures, such as a tribe, or a small, mobile hunter-gatherer band (as is typical of the San), differing over geography and shifting as their conditions change and they adapt. Which is perfect. You need that flexibility to settle a harsh land like Antarctica.
The largest and most extreme settlements in the first 2000 years will be no bigger than a Haida village with at most 1500 people in its peak, with the structure resembling a nuraghe. So far, not very deviant. Many of these settlements will collapse after a century or a few. One or way another, I expect that these will soon form tribes with strong descent/affinal kinship systems. These tribes will then engage in sporadic warfare against each other over many centuries, contributing to the collapse of the aforementioned settlements.
Meanwhile, the more mobile populations living outside of the villages and in correspondingly traditional lifestyles, will be driven out by this intertribal warfare. I must stress that the tribes are only sedentary in a relative, a comparative sense. The mobile populations will be pioneers, being the first to explore other islands and soon landing on the vast, contiguous landmass of East Antarctica. With their expulsion and constant retreat from the more warlike tribes, they react culturally - and develop norms that weaken any form of descent/affine kinship their system may have had.
According to what I've read, by David Graeber and David Wengrow - it appears that many of the hunter gatherer bands we've encountered in Africa, seem to have more "fictive" of a kinship system than we originally thought. A band could even have members that don't speak the same native language! Members that hail from lands many many hundreds of kilometers away!
This seems like a good prototype for these mobile Antarctican hunter-gatherers. Let's call them the "Proto-Proto-Mana". The hunter gatherers living in tribes have also invaded East Antarctica, albeit on the opposite side. These, we shall call the "Proto-Proto-Yagna".
The PPY culture begins to settle down along a great river, in a hilly peninsula at the end of the Transantarctic Mountains. They develop agriculture in short order - after 3000 years since humans started living in Antarctica. Since they're familiar and tribal, they develop like a typical dawn civilization, and eventually form typical citystates and cities proper. Animal domestication comes in short order. The copper age is on the horizon.
The PPM settle down in a colder, and vastly more flat area akin to a Siberian plain with a humid continental climate. Subarctic taiga surrounds them, but they have access to a river, a river that could give the Nile a run for its money. They settle down much much later than the Proto-Proto-Yagna, and they'll be directly transitioning from small bands to living in great settlements comparable to the Cucuteni-Trypilia, though, of course, in either underground or nuraghic-type complexes.
Then volcanoes erupt, and the entire continent is plunged into darkness. A Year without a Summer. Droughts, frosts and so on devastate the respective civilizations, and for the Proto-Proto-Yagna much worse - since they live closer to the volcanoes. Maybe the volcanoes even rain debris down on villages, flattening houses. Civilization collapses.
I won't talk about the Proto-Proto-Yagna further. They're meant to be a corollary to the Proto-Proto-Mana, less of an experiment in anthropology, although they have Tsalal-like elements. Nevertheless, they're not comparatively more "evil" than other cultures, like in former New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest. They practice cannibalism, human sacrifice. The Antarctic environment is too harsh for slavery however, so indenture takes on a more feudalistic form. Entire tribes may be consigned to tenant farming after losing wars.
Human sacrifice may even apply to the "less evil" Proto-Proto-Mana too; certainly, both of them will practice infanticide.
Enough about all of that dreary stuff. After a long-winded background, it's time to talk about socialism, and philofocal system once and for all.
The first civilization of the PPM, before the collapse - I would say, is comparable to the Indus Valley one, the Harappan cultures. We know that these civilizations were at least, relatively egalitarian. Every house apparently had access to plumbing, and modern-like amenities. But these houses could just as easily be for mere artisans, traders. Not farmers. Were they an egalitarian utopia? We don't know, and it could easily be that the relative material inequality we see, were part of giant works, projects enacted by otherwise tyrannical-ish, governments to win the favor of the public. Now, I'd say - even that, already implies less inequality. If the underclass(?) is strong enough to demand plumbing for every house, then it would seem that they held outsized influence compared to say, Europe in the Middle Ages.
There's of course, Teotihuacán. If we can conceive of socialistic civilizations, and surely they could carry out complex projects - it might be possible that Teotihuacán had an incredibly egalitarian system with no powerful despot to speak of, and that they constructed their Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon entirely out of democratic volition. Or further, could it be possible that they later abandoned a stratified society, and the palaces later let in commoners? There are many who say Teotihuacán had a coercive system, and there are many who persuasively argue for the opposite.
Okay, on to the Proto-Proto-Mana themselves. Their first civilization will last perhaps 700 years, and I've decided that they'll be in a transitionary sort of state when it comes to kinship. One or way another, even if we don't know the exact mechanism, sedentary societies end up with descent/affine kinship. Tribalism. The first households may have been matrifocal. There were likely hunter-gatherers coming in all from over the area, and their customs against such kinship will persist, but continue to weaken. The conflict may take on a maternal/band dichotomy. Blood brothers against brood mothers.
It's been a long time since they encountered any actual warlike tribes. 1,700 years in fact, when they do collapse. And we know that the Proto-Proto-Mana are of the composite band variety, so sometimes we might even end up with tribes anyway - and certainly, they won't be warlike enough to prove the point of the anti-tribals.
The real question is, would their customs against such kinship still persist in all that time? Probably. A lot of religions are more than 1,700 years old.
When the Proto-Proto-Mana collapse, could we see a conservative backlash? The cities are likely to be torn apart by looting, by war, and so on as we saw in the Bronze Age Collapse. Even if the bandsmen themselves don't actually end up being the major driving force of cooperation, we only need society at large to think that they were. They may convince the Proto-Proto-Mana, that they were responsible for their salvation. They may blame the families, the mothers, for suffocating them with their blathering about "Nothing stronger than family". Oh, hue and cry! Some babies are born with an umbilical cord wrapped around their neck, did you know that? That's the world saying to us, here, this is the proof, that mothers suffocate.
Let's say that the backlash succeeds. No more tribalism. We'll all be brothers and sisters once and for all.
What will the philofocal system end up being like?
First, we have a typical group of friends, and let's say that some of the members are in couples. One way or another, they have kids. They raise the kids, until they reach adulthood. Say, like, ten, thirteen, sixteen? The age is sort of arbitrary (though I'd be pleasantly surprised if you guys know of any correlations/relationships). Once you're considered a man (or a woman), the elders take you away from your mother and father. They won't actually need to - you've been told over and over again, that to be a man/woman, you must leave the bird's nest. You must spread your wings.
You won't be completely alone. In fact, while your parents did some raising, you usually went to a nursery, or a room where the entire village raises their kids, during the winters. In the city, many such rooms for many neighborhoods. The people you grew up with in the communal childcare system, are your blood brothers. They're your friends. You all decide to get together and move out elsewhere. In the summer, you work the fields together, fishing, or you may go hunting, and so on.
This is the "Proto-Mana" kinship system. Later, as certain fellows start finding strange orange rocks and shiny yellow rocks, these friend-bands may even go out to work in copper and gold mining colonies, up the river and across the bay where their Nile-like delta is located.
What say you guys? Is it a plausible system? It's 90% conjecture, but well, so is most of alternate history anyway - can't escape it. I'd love to hear from an anthropologist, an archaeologist, or a historian - any expert really on this; I'd say it seems logical enough, but we have to examine our assumptions.
Are my assumptions about the first civilizations wrong? Was Teotihuacán's egalitarianism really just the talk of cranks? Did we have more evidence for the Indus Valley civilization being... more coercive? Am I painting a misleading picture of the consensus? Am I wrong that grand-scale public works projects don't have the social significance in the way that I thought? Are there any alternate theories as to what they were like? Were David Graeber's claims of fictive-like kinship among some African hunter-gatherer bands, misleading and inaccurate? Was I right about composite hunter-gatherer bands? Please, tell me what you think.
Thank you for reading all the way - and answering my many questions; I hope you enjoyed, it at least!
I've been thinking about a type of alternative "family" system as opposed to say, matrifocality or patriarchical systems. To summarize: "What if the concept, that friends are your true family, developed into an actual kinship system among hunter-gatherers settling down, i.e. transitioning from agriculture?"
Now, we're aware of course, that "Friends are your family" is a very recent invention. It has its origins in the deterioration of the nuclear family in the United States, and certainly it's not a dominant kinship system at all; now with that out of the way, I'd like to explain how I ended up at such a system for my fictional culture:
First off, let us start with some background. I'm currently working on a Green Antarctica inspired TL. It's name is "Oops! All Blue Antarctica!" - I might crosspost from alternatehistory.com here, at some point. The mission is try to tend towards on the realistic side, and even veer into the opposite in certain, but major areas. If you don't know what Green Antarctica is: it's an excellently entertaining ASB on alternatehistory.com about: "what if Antarctica was warm and ice-free? Would humans settle? How would society develop?"
(Note: The following 1,500 words, are well, lengthy, so if you want to skip - scroll down to the next part in bold.)
What do I mean by opposite? As many people have thought, in replies in the Green Antarctica thread - would the Antarcticans really be that depraved and horrible? It seems like it goes against history, that in extreme conditions and times of hardship, people actually work together. They don't just start killing each other off. What if the first Antarctic states were actually socialist and friendly, compared to the traumatizing secret societies of the Yag? Where all Antarcticans are brothers and they work for the greater good, rather than driving a knife into each other's backs and [REDACTED] each other's corpses?
I think that there is a degree of truth to both perspectives. Certainly people worked together, but it would be remiss to not say that people did not take advantage of each other, that they did not steal. In the Bronze Age Collapse, there was a lot of war. We'd be also contradicting history if we didn't say that there were any wars.
You may be asking, "but what's that got to do with your philofocal system?". My ultimate goal is to nudge the Antarcticans, at least some of them, into eventually ending up with a socialistic system. Now, I don't think the final system will be that socialist. It may resemble it on the surface, but when you look inside - there may be a whole lot of coercion - like the Tawatinsuyu. I'd be happy if I ended up with a system like the Tawatinsuyu.
So, let's think about the first hunter gatherers settling in Antarctica. In the climate map I've worked out so far, the first areas they will be inhabiting, will be large islands covered in a Valdivian-type rainy forest, with an oceanic climate more akin to Reykjavik at Iceland. Once they've got past the initial challenges (such as a six month long night-winter), the environment will be bountiful enough to support very high population densities for hunter-gatherers wanting to settle (but not enough to support anything like, for example, Catalhoyuk or Cucuteni-Trypilia).
Our first hunter gatherers will come from the proto-Yahgan population living in Tierra del Fuego. According to my research, it appears that the Yahgan are of the "composite band" variety. I'm not clear on what composite band actually means. It seems to indicate that they could be arranged into many different structures, such as a tribe, or a small, mobile hunter-gatherer band (as is typical of the San), differing over geography and shifting as their conditions change and they adapt. Which is perfect. You need that flexibility to settle a harsh land like Antarctica.
The largest and most extreme settlements in the first 2000 years will be no bigger than a Haida village with at most 1500 people in its peak, with the structure resembling a nuraghe. So far, not very deviant. Many of these settlements will collapse after a century or a few. One or way another, I expect that these will soon form tribes with strong descent/affinal kinship systems. These tribes will then engage in sporadic warfare against each other over many centuries, contributing to the collapse of the aforementioned settlements.
Meanwhile, the more mobile populations living outside of the villages and in correspondingly traditional lifestyles, will be driven out by this intertribal warfare. I must stress that the tribes are only sedentary in a relative, a comparative sense. The mobile populations will be pioneers, being the first to explore other islands and soon landing on the vast, contiguous landmass of East Antarctica. With their expulsion and constant retreat from the more warlike tribes, they react culturally - and develop norms that weaken any form of descent/affine kinship their system may have had.
According to what I've read, by David Graeber and David Wengrow - it appears that many of the hunter gatherer bands we've encountered in Africa, seem to have more "fictive" of a kinship system than we originally thought. A band could even have members that don't speak the same native language! Members that hail from lands many many hundreds of kilometers away!
This seems like a good prototype for these mobile Antarctican hunter-gatherers. Let's call them the "Proto-Proto-Mana". The hunter gatherers living in tribes have also invaded East Antarctica, albeit on the opposite side. These, we shall call the "Proto-Proto-Yagna".
The PPY culture begins to settle down along a great river, in a hilly peninsula at the end of the Transantarctic Mountains. They develop agriculture in short order - after 3000 years since humans started living in Antarctica. Since they're familiar and tribal, they develop like a typical dawn civilization, and eventually form typical citystates and cities proper. Animal domestication comes in short order. The copper age is on the horizon.
The PPM settle down in a colder, and vastly more flat area akin to a Siberian plain with a humid continental climate. Subarctic taiga surrounds them, but they have access to a river, a river that could give the Nile a run for its money. They settle down much much later than the Proto-Proto-Yagna, and they'll be directly transitioning from small bands to living in great settlements comparable to the Cucuteni-Trypilia, though, of course, in either underground or nuraghic-type complexes.
Then volcanoes erupt, and the entire continent is plunged into darkness. A Year without a Summer. Droughts, frosts and so on devastate the respective civilizations, and for the Proto-Proto-Yagna much worse - since they live closer to the volcanoes. Maybe the volcanoes even rain debris down on villages, flattening houses. Civilization collapses.
I won't talk about the Proto-Proto-Yagna further. They're meant to be a corollary to the Proto-Proto-Mana, less of an experiment in anthropology, although they have Tsalal-like elements. Nevertheless, they're not comparatively more "evil" than other cultures, like in former New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest. They practice cannibalism, human sacrifice. The Antarctic environment is too harsh for slavery however, so indenture takes on a more feudalistic form. Entire tribes may be consigned to tenant farming after losing wars.
Human sacrifice may even apply to the "less evil" Proto-Proto-Mana too; certainly, both of them will practice infanticide.
Enough about all of that dreary stuff. After a long-winded background, it's time to talk about socialism, and philofocal system once and for all.
The first civilization of the PPM, before the collapse - I would say, is comparable to the Indus Valley one, the Harappan cultures. We know that these civilizations were at least, relatively egalitarian. Every house apparently had access to plumbing, and modern-like amenities. But these houses could just as easily be for mere artisans, traders. Not farmers. Were they an egalitarian utopia? We don't know, and it could easily be that the relative material inequality we see, were part of giant works, projects enacted by otherwise tyrannical-ish, governments to win the favor of the public. Now, I'd say - even that, already implies less inequality. If the underclass(?) is strong enough to demand plumbing for every house, then it would seem that they held outsized influence compared to say, Europe in the Middle Ages.
There's of course, Teotihuacán. If we can conceive of socialistic civilizations, and surely they could carry out complex projects - it might be possible that Teotihuacán had an incredibly egalitarian system with no powerful despot to speak of, and that they constructed their Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon entirely out of democratic volition. Or further, could it be possible that they later abandoned a stratified society, and the palaces later let in commoners? There are many who say Teotihuacán had a coercive system, and there are many who persuasively argue for the opposite.
Okay, on to the Proto-Proto-Mana themselves. Their first civilization will last perhaps 700 years, and I've decided that they'll be in a transitionary sort of state when it comes to kinship. One or way another, even if we don't know the exact mechanism, sedentary societies end up with descent/affine kinship. Tribalism. The first households may have been matrifocal. There were likely hunter-gatherers coming in all from over the area, and their customs against such kinship will persist, but continue to weaken. The conflict may take on a maternal/band dichotomy. Blood brothers against brood mothers.
It's been a long time since they encountered any actual warlike tribes. 1,700 years in fact, when they do collapse. And we know that the Proto-Proto-Mana are of the composite band variety, so sometimes we might even end up with tribes anyway - and certainly, they won't be warlike enough to prove the point of the anti-tribals.
The real question is, would their customs against such kinship still persist in all that time? Probably. A lot of religions are more than 1,700 years old.
When the Proto-Proto-Mana collapse, could we see a conservative backlash? The cities are likely to be torn apart by looting, by war, and so on as we saw in the Bronze Age Collapse. Even if the bandsmen themselves don't actually end up being the major driving force of cooperation, we only need society at large to think that they were. They may convince the Proto-Proto-Mana, that they were responsible for their salvation. They may blame the families, the mothers, for suffocating them with their blathering about "Nothing stronger than family". Oh, hue and cry! Some babies are born with an umbilical cord wrapped around their neck, did you know that? That's the world saying to us, here, this is the proof, that mothers suffocate.
Let's say that the backlash succeeds. No more tribalism. We'll all be brothers and sisters once and for all.
What will the philofocal system end up being like?
First, we have a typical group of friends, and let's say that some of the members are in couples. One way or another, they have kids. They raise the kids, until they reach adulthood. Say, like, ten, thirteen, sixteen? The age is sort of arbitrary (though I'd be pleasantly surprised if you guys know of any correlations/relationships). Once you're considered a man (or a woman), the elders take you away from your mother and father. They won't actually need to - you've been told over and over again, that to be a man/woman, you must leave the bird's nest. You must spread your wings.
You won't be completely alone. In fact, while your parents did some raising, you usually went to a nursery, or a room where the entire village raises their kids, during the winters. In the city, many such rooms for many neighborhoods. The people you grew up with in the communal childcare system, are your blood brothers. They're your friends. You all decide to get together and move out elsewhere. In the summer, you work the fields together, fishing, or you may go hunting, and so on.
This is the "Proto-Mana" kinship system. Later, as certain fellows start finding strange orange rocks and shiny yellow rocks, these friend-bands may even go out to work in copper and gold mining colonies, up the river and across the bay where their Nile-like delta is located.
What say you guys? Is it a plausible system? It's 90% conjecture, but well, so is most of alternate history anyway - can't escape it. I'd love to hear from an anthropologist, an archaeologist, or a historian - any expert really on this; I'd say it seems logical enough, but we have to examine our assumptions.
Are my assumptions about the first civilizations wrong? Was Teotihuacán's egalitarianism really just the talk of cranks? Did we have more evidence for the Indus Valley civilization being... more coercive? Am I painting a misleading picture of the consensus? Am I wrong that grand-scale public works projects don't have the social significance in the way that I thought? Are there any alternate theories as to what they were like? Were David Graeber's claims of fictive-like kinship among some African hunter-gatherer bands, misleading and inaccurate? Was I right about composite hunter-gatherer bands? Please, tell me what you think.
Thank you for reading all the way - and answering my many questions; I hope you enjoyed, it at least!
