By gathering the results of his ethnological research, anthropologist Charles Stépanoff comes to an agreement with Attachments a vast fresco that questions many assumptions about human exceptionalism and the birth of hierarchical societies. It answers the questions of “The World of Books” in his Paris office, next to the Collège de France.
You question the idea that the State and the hierarchy of human societies are the result of the transition to agriculture, or even of a “cereal revolution.” What alternative model do you propose?
It is not a question of reversing all previous explanatory models, but rather of refining them, of trying to understand whether the major mechanisms that establish a direct correlation between cereal cultivation and states are valid. However, we find state societies without cereals, such as those in the steppes based on pastoralism with a tax based on a wild resource, namely the skins of squirrels and foxes. The largest state on the planet, the Russian Federation, was thus built on the basis of the collection of furs, a legacy of Mongol domination, which the Russians then returned to the Asian peoples. The states of Hawaii have economies based on tubers or pigs, therefore without cereals.
In AttachmentsI develop the idea that our human nature, if it exists, is not closed in on itself but is open to otherness. The emergence of hierarchical systems implies an alteration of the forms of attachment. Among the Indians of the northwest coast of the United States, for example, the nobles are “hyper-attached” and have exclusive links with the invisible, the spirits of the bear, the raven, the whales. On the contrary, at the extreme end of social organization, we find the slaves, who are “detached” in the sense that they have no access to the spiritual world and only a material relationship with the world. According to the terminology I use, the slaves maintain a “metabolic” relationship with the world, which is related to energy, while the nobility acquires the monopoly of “intersubjective” relationships with the invisible or other species. Thus, differentiation occurs neither through diet nor economy, but through the reorganization of the forms of attachment.
How then to understand the rise of domination?
We see that man certainly has a hierarchical tendency, but also a tendency towards equality. We see this in human societies that value sharing and fairness; we see it even in small children and it seems to be ingrained in our psychology. This is not the case with the other great apes, among whom we see only despotic forms of organization, “alpha males” who appropriate a large part of the females and all the food. This tyrannical behavior is particularly found among chimpanzees. The leader, in hunter-gatherer societies, is not the one who hits or shouts the loudest, but the one who organizes the sharing and aims to ensure well-being through his relationships with the spirits and gods. Humans need to rely on something more than the balance of power between humans to establish lasting hierarchical systems.
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