Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Iban, Borneo, and the “Egalitarianism” Debate
- Iban Egalitarianism
- Equality and Adat
- Egalitarian Leadership
- The Concept of Pun
- Objective Inequality and the Absence of Stratification
- Equality and Hierarchy
- The Political Economy of Traditional Inequality
- Textiles and “Women’s Warfare”
- Ritual and Hierarchy
- Conclusion
- References
Ragi ubong samoa dedudok ari burak magang, Tang chura iya digaga’ dudi, nya’ alai bisi’ mansau, Kuning, gadong enggau biru.
All cotton threads start out as white, But after they are dyed, they become red, yellow, green, and blue.
(an Iban saying)
The characterization of societies as “egalitarian” — in Borneo as elsewhere in the non-Western world — has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years (Boehm 1993; Flanagan and Rayner 1988; Flanagan 1989; Woodburn 1982). Even so, despite this newfound interest, compared to “hierarchy”, notions of equality have been far less explored in the anthropological literature. Part of the reason is almost certainly as Flanagan (1989:261) suggests: that equality tends to be “naturalized” in the social sciences and so regarded as the proto-cultural condition out of which structures of inequality are presumed to have developed by evolutionary differentiation (cf. Fried 1967). Thus it is not equality, but the origin and maintenance of inequality that is viewed as problematic and therefore the primary subject of sociological speculation and theory. Relatedly, inequality is taken by many to be universal (cf. Fallers 1973) — an inherent property of all human social systems; or the term “egalitarian” is applied by default, as a residual category, to those societies that otherwise lack clearly defined hierarchical features.
In discussing “egalitarian” societies, it is useful at the outset to distinguish between “equality”, “egality” and “egalitarian”. The distinction, I propose, is not unlike the one that some have drawn between the “individual”, as an entity arguably constitutive of all societies, and “individualism”, an ideology present in some societies, absent in others, that gives accent to the individual, to individual autonomy, and so on. “Egality”, like “individualism”, is a cultural construct. Following Woodburn (1982:431-432), I would argue that the related term “egalitarian” is therefore best reserved for societies in which relations of equality, to the extent that they exist, are:
not neutral, the mere absence of inequality or hierarchy, but [are] asserted [emphasis in the original], … repeatedly acted out, [and] publicly demonstrated …
An “egalitarian” society is therefore a cultural configured social system, just as is a “hierarchical” one. These distinctions may be briefly summarized as follows:[1]
egality
- Following Woodburn, a cultural construct or set of ideas,
- which therefore operates at the level of ideology;
- has the potential for creating objective relations of equality; that is, as ideology, of configuring social relationships in its own image; and
- has also the mystificatory potential to obscure or conceal relations of inequality.
- “Egalitarian” is an appropriate term since in the standard concise Oxford definition, it refers to “the principle of equal rights, etc. for all persons”, that is to say, it has to do with the principle or concept of equality, i.e. with jural rather than de facto reality.
equality
- refers to the process whereby individuals compare themselves with each other and find themselves the same;
- operates at the level of objective conditions of existence.
- “Equality”, in common standard usage, refers to the notion of equivalence; to “The condition of having equal dignity, rank, or privileges with others; the fact of being on an equal footing” (The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition).
Contrasting these terms, in a parallel way:
hierarchy
- like egality, is a cultural construct,
- which similarly operates as ideology, and
- following the numbered points above, has the ability to create and maintain relations of inequality; and
- also has a mystificatory potential to conceal relations of equality. [This latter possibility is little discussed by students of hierarchy, although Michael Allen (1987), in pointing up the existence of relations of equality in a Nepalese society, shows how both caste ideology and Dumontian social theory similarly work to mask its presence.]
inequality
- refers to the objective conditions of existence in which individuals have different opportunities and achieve different statuses.
The relation between these notions can be depicted by means of a simple four-cell diagram (Figure 1). Here “hierarchy” and “egality” have to do with culture and ideology; “inequality” and “equality” with material conditions and social relationships. Read vertically, “inequality” is opposed to “equality”; “hierarchical” to “egalitarian”.
It follows from these distinctions that conditions of inequality may exist in an “egalitarian society” and those of “equality” in a “hierarchical” one, and, indeed, equality and inequality may coexist as modalities within a single social system (cf. Flanagan 1989:261). Similarly, a point made in this paper, “egalitarian” and “hierarchical” cultural values may be contextually articulated in different domains within the same society. In what follows I use these notions to reexamine a debate concerning the characterization of Iban society as “egalitarianism”.