ASE paper - The University of Texas at Austin



Eighteenth-century Choctaw Chiefs, Dual Organization, and the Exploration of Social Design Space

Patricia Galloway

University of Texas-Austin

galloway@gslis.utexas.edu

Introduction

Several of the main ideas that make up this paper have been lurking in my thoughts for years, indeed ever since I presented a paper on Choctaw naming conventions as social and genealogical evidence at this meeting in 1988 (Galloway 1988), but they might never have come together without the catalyst of Greg O’Brien’s new book on Choctaw leadership in the late eighteenth century, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, the manuscript of which he was gracious enough to share with me a year ago (O’Brien 2002). O’Brien has framed his argument for changes in Choctaw leadership during the late eighteenth century in the context of economic changes in the colonial landscape and the gender roles in southeastern matrilineal societies. He proposes a baseline definition of gender roles according to which women were symbolically whole, while men were not. Women were capable of creating life and hence naturally powerful spiritually, whereas men had to prove their grasp of spiritual power. To prove their spiritual power, all men had to be successful in war (or the hunt, or perhaps the ballgame) and to achieve outstanding leadership they had to be able to retrieve magical tokens from afar; there was no fundamental differentiation between the tasks required of “war” and “peace” chiefs. Because southeastern men with leadership ambitions aspired to such demonstrations, they were vulnerable (or perhaps “preadapted”) to the twin appeals of war with their neighbors and trade with Europeans, and O’Brien shows how this phenomenon played itself out through the careers of two late eighteenth-century chiefs, Franchimastabé and Taboca. The quick adoption of the new market economy was thus a product of a kind of “mobilization of desire” not precisely intended by European merchants, since their trade goods could have been construed from the Choctaw side as directly symbolic of spiritual power and therefore literally fetishized rather than metaphorically so (Kopytoff 1989).

Obviously this brief paragraph does not do the arguments as much justice as the paper we have just heard and the book itself. I agree that this hypothesis is very interesting as an explanation of chiefly choices during the eighteenth century, and to the degree that Choctaw men had begun to adopt Euroamerican habits of thought I suspect that it is correct. But I believe it raises a great many other fruitful questions by virtue of the detailed analysis of the two chiefs’ careers, and in this paper I want to ask whether some of them are applicable in the Choctaw case for several decades earlier. I am especially interested in how the behaviors of these particular chiefs can be compared with those of their predecessors, with reference especially to how they were embedded in a historical sequence of events. I think it is possible to propose that there might be a “rest of the story” that sees the behavior of Choctaw male leaders that O’Brien has described in a larger context of traditional activities connected with dual organization broadly (and quite heterogeneously) construed. I think that the participation of certain Choctaw leaders in the “market revolution” of the late eighteenth century not only represented an aspect of quite traditional practices that made southeastern polities so flexible and resilient, but was a development that did not lessen that resilience. O’Brien’s work offers the occasion for a reconsideration of what we think we know about Choctaw social organization and for a much better understanding of the “micropolitics of power” among the Choctaw of the late eighteenth century.

Dual Organization

Along with others who have been eager to sweep away bad old structuralist excesses that tended to ignore the complexities of especially gender relationships, O’Brien has rejected dual organization and turned to the construction of gender for an explanation of the sources of power in Choctaw political leadership. But it is important to draw a distinction between the too-convenient tendency to consider that dual organization offers a single axis for organizing all aspects of distinction in a social entity (the binary-oppositions list syndrome) and the real perspicuousness of the concept for framing quite varied sociocultural phenomena that all share the common theme of tension between vital elements of communal life (see Maybury-Lewis and Almagor 1989). These include gender as well as marriage rules and practices, genealogical classifications, age-sets, spatial organization, color symbolism, temporal process, and the distribution of power. Before we set aside dual organization among the eighteenth-century Choctaw as a significant factor of social organization, we should first attempt an understanding of what it actually meant (see Galloway 1988).

The European documents speak of two “races” or “castes”(French), or “families” (English) which were ranked and which seemed to dominate individual villages and even perhaps village groups. These two groups were known as the Inholahta and Imoklasha in order of rank. We have one piece of evidence cited by Swanton that maps the Creek-like classifications of Red and White onto the two in that order; yet this classification would conflict with the widespread southeastern preference for white/peace/civil chiefs as the more distinguished leaders (Gearing 1962; Reid 1970), and it also conflicts with French and English evidence that is consistent in suggesting the opposite case (Galloway 1995; O’Brien 2002). So there is European testimony to the idea that the two Inholahta and Imoklasha groups may have played a role similar to the White and Red Creek function of dominating the actions of peace and war in that order. These parallels were what interested Swanton and led to the assumption that dual organization among the Choctaw might be articulated along a single axis. But they were based more on informed speculation than solid evidence, and to make a more sophisticated post-structuralist analysis of the myriad elements now understood to underlie traditional notions of dual organization—as well as to make good other claims about eighteenth-century Choctaw social organization and traditional sources of power (including my suggestion that the two groups may have originally, in the seventeenth century, reflected the two dominant ingredient ethnicities of the Choctaw confederacy, the “Moundvillian” and “prairie” in that order)—it is important to address several still unanswered questions about dual organization among the Choctaw:

1. Did Inholahta and Imoklasha actually function as moieties regulating marriage among all the people who considered themselves Choctaw in the eighteenth century? Is O’Brien right when he suggests that this function was filled by the iksas that were already part of the constituent ethnic groups and did not need to concern the apparent moieties?

2. Were the two great male political roles, peace and war leadership, articulated on the same moiety division, did they represent a second duality, or were they two poles of a separate axis of male leadership? Did each village and division have both a peace and a war chief, or might a village be led by one or the other?

3. How did peace chiefs manage to prove themselves spiritually powerful if they were forbidden to shed blood? Is O’Brien right in assuming that all males of whatever category were called on to prove themselves through violence against human life (cf. Slotkin 1973), or is there some other way that blood might come into the process of constructing Choctaw masculinity in the eighteenth century? And does it really make sense for the male coming-of-age to be seen as a kind of mimickry of the female?

4. Did the peace/war dichotomy only map fortuitously onto an emerging discourse of traditional/progressive (or, as Carson 1999 would have it, primordialist/cosmopolitan) as increasing commoditization began to disenchant every realm of Choctaw conduct, or is there a deeper universal principle at work here, that might explain the persistence of some kind of duality as a way of describing Choctaw leadership?

In this paper I will try to at least open up some of these questions, following on from issues capably raised by O’Brien and using a broadened dataset drawn from Choctaw chiefly activities from roughly 1700 to 1800.

Two Cases and their context: Alibamon Mingo/Red Shoe, Taboca/Franchimastabé

The careers of these four preeminently visible Choctaw leaders of the colonial period must first be sketched in processual and life-cycle terms. Alibamon Mingo and Soulouche Oumastabé were born into the colonial context but reared far from visibility during the initial colonial period when neither the French nor the English were attempting to micromanage the Choctaw. They would have been youths of the same age-set at the time when Europeans across the Southeast suffered an early bout of “Indian troubles” following on the Yamassee War of 1715, but in French Louisiana there was little repercussion for the Choctaw. In the 1730s they emerged as “young” (twenty-something? thirty-something?) subordinate leaders during the Natchez and Chickasaw wars, Alibamon Mingo being the second in rank for the Concha towns and Soulouche Oumastabé as fourth in rank for the perhaps more important Couechitto town group, home of the central Choctaw leader intentionally constructed by the French in 1701. Circumstances and their own initiative raised both to prominence in the French-led wars against the Natchez and Chickasaw in the 1730s. At this time Alibamon Mingo was named with a “war” apellation (Alibamon Ajo, “berserker”) when he led a war party to assist the French in recovering their women, children, and African slaves held hostage by the Natchez—although it should be pointed out that his most notable act on that occasion was to negotiate successfully with the Natchez for the release of the French women and children. Meanwhile Soulouche Oumastabé by his own testimony had performed mighty feats against the Chickasaws in client warfare for the French during the 1720s (White 1981), and he also led a party against the Natchez..[1] By 1732 both Alibamon Mingo (as chief of Concha) and Soulouche Oumastabé (as war chief of Couechitto) had French medals. Both of them then remained the most visible of Choctaw leaders as the Europeans attempted to manipulate them in favor of their own colonial ends: in the middle 1730s both flirted with British trade, Soulouche Oumastabé more effectively because of his close relations with several Chickasaw leaders, but he continued overruled by the Great Chief, who committed the Choctaw to war against the Chickasaw on behalf of the French in 1736. French shortages in the 1740s, when both doubtless depended upon French trade goods to some degree to maintain their leadership through generosity to followers, eventuated in the Choctaw civil war when Soulouche Oumastabé had French traders killed and Alibamon Mingo was eventually compelled to secure vengeance for it, in the course of which Soulouche Oumastabé was killed. It is arguable that other chiefs continued to be equally or more important until Red Shoe was dead, the Choctaw civil war was over, and Alibamon Mingo had attained to the distinguished seniority that made him preeminently authoritative in the 1760s, but certainly these two men remained extremely visible to French observers of diplomacy and warfare from 1729 to their deaths in 1747 (Soulouche Oumastabé) and 1770 or thereabout (Alibamon Mingo). Finally, as I have argued elsewhere, Alibamon Mingo seems to have been an Inholahta, while Soulouche Oumastabé was an Imoklasha.

O’Brien has given a significant account of the lives of Taboca and Franchimastabé in his book and various articles, so I will not elaborate here. I would remark, however, that there may have been more to the remarkable Taboca than even O’Brien has suggested, since he is not the only man to have borne the name: on the 1729 lists three men were identified not only as Taboca, but also as holding the office of Taskanangouchi (according to one account, the man who “gives out offices”), suggesting that the name may have gone with the role (see Galloway 1988). Both leaders were known to the English by 1763, and Taboca even played a role in the early negotiations between the English and Choctaws after the departure of the French, but as was true in at least the case of Alibamon Mingo (Soulouche Oumastabé’s Great Chief outlived him), neither of them could fully emerge to preeminent external leadership until elder leaders were dead. I cannot identify the specific moiety to which each belonged, but if O’Brien is right that Taboca was married to Franchimastabé’s sister, then at least they had to belong to opposite moieties.

I think it is also important to observe that Red Shoe and Franchimastabé both emerged as what might be termed unmanageable local war leaders barely subordinated to elder chiefs, just as Alibamon Mingo and Taboca emerged primarily as local peace leaders initially apprenticed to elders. These facts are significant to understanding how the thematic of two primary male leadership careers might be articulated.

Function/meaning of Inholahta/Imoklasha

What do we actually know after all about what Inholahta and Imoklasha meant to the Choctaw confederacy in the eighteenth century and earlier? Precious little in any direct way, it turns out: just those few items cited above, plus the testimony of the Jesuit missionary to the Choctaw that each of the two groups had specific “races” grouped under it. Greg Urban’s recent (1994) review of southeastern social organization, particularly the linguistic evidence for it, found that Choctaw social organization should be grouped with those of the core-Muskhogean linguistic group: Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw. The diagnostic feature of the core-Muskhogean group was in fact the presence of matrilineal moieties, which in the case of the Choctaw were “unquestionably exogamous” (Urban 1994:173). In addition to the function of regulating marriage, Urban confirmed Swanton’s claim that they also certainly served to structure the performance of roles in burials and may have been involved in the organization of the ballgame (175-6).

What did it mean for the moieties to be concerned in the provision of burial services? Anthropological studies of death contend that death, as the fundamental societal disruption, constitutes an occasion of danger and pollution. Where the “death work” of body handling and preparation is done by an Other, the practice serves to dissipate a pollution that is seen as dangerous only for Same. We know that the Choctaw also provide a model for what is referred to in mortuary studies as extended or secondary processing of the body (Hertz 1960). Choctaw burial practice included the scaffolding of the body for a period of months during which the flesh rotted; preparation of the body for a next stage of transition into the Otherworld by persons referred to as “bone-pickers” who removed the remaining flesh, packaged the bones in a basket, and officiated at mourning ceremonies; and preservation of bone packages in a community ossuary for a period of time, after which the entire contents of the ossuary was enclosed in a mound of earth. Swanton reported all these facts from profuse observations collected significantly from nineteenth-century witnesses (when the practice was under siege from Christian missionaries), but was not explicit about how the moiety function worked itself out in this picture (Swanton 1931). If indeed the so-called bone-pickers themselves (who could apparently be male or female) also performed their offices only for decedents of the opposite moiety to their own (if, indeed, there were always at least two Choctaw bone-pickers at any one time—some testimonies indicated more), then by definition the opposite moiety was present at the beginning and ending of all Choctaw life and had a fundamental part in the definition of the perdurable form of an individual’s identity (i.e., bone rather than flesh). It may also be important to pay attention to the fact that part of the final bone preparation process seems to have been painting the skull red, perhaps to signal the bloody crown of a head being “born” into the Otherworld.

Another question that should be asked is whether the moieties had a role in other major ceremonial events. By analogy with other southeastern polities we might reasonably expect that they had such a role for major ceremonials such as green corn or harvest, but we might also ask by analogy with the mortuary duty whether they also functioned similarly at other such status transition ceremonies as birth, puberty, and transition to “honored” or elder status. For these latter roles, however, we have no solid evidence but only analogy.

Urban points out the anomalous position of the Choctaw with respect to the lack of totemic clans and the substitution of what Swanton called “house” or local groups that were apparently matrilineal and shared a segmentary (as opposed to structural) nature. This would mean that they were truly local groups in geographical proximity, tending to fission when growing beyond a certain size. But among the Choctaw these local groups were both exogamous and aligned with one of the moieties, which would tend to maintain the moieties as geographically distinct rather than broadly distributed, and this accords well with evidence that has suggested originary geographical (east and west) and ethnic identities for the Inholahta and Imoklasha. What this means is not that there was a bewildering thicket of marriage prohibitions: a person was obliged to marry both outside his local group and outside his moiety, which merely meant that all the local groups in the opposite moiety offered possible marriage partners. Because residence was matrilocal, however, matrifocal residence groups would therefore remain geographically fixed. For the eighteenth century there is no secure evidence to assert whether married men spent most of their time in their wives’ households rather than in their sisters’. There is scattered evidence, however, that when women truly married “out” (that is, beyond the boundaries of the emergent Choctaw confederacy), they might go to live in the polity of their husband, just as a “foreign” woman might marry into a Choctaw town in order to cement an alliance (as I suspect was the origin of Alibamon Mingo’s name and stated rank among the Alabama Indians).

Urban also emphasizes that although in the core-Muskhogean tribes there is some evidence of ranking in the form of moiety ranking (Inholahta as “elder brother” to Imoklasha in the Choctaw case), emergence of chiefly clans (to the extent that chiefs had more than local power), and a control hierarchy of age grades (“stages of warriorhood to elderhood”), nevertheless “the core-Muskhogean systems were strongly egalitarian” (1994:178). This is a point we should not forget in considering any claims that Choctaw chiefly leadership was in any substantive sense equivalent to Mississippian chiefdom elite ranking. Repeated testimony of chiefs themselves (regretting their lack of control over their turbulent young men) and the evidence of behavior (endless exhaustive public discussion of important events by people of every rank) makes it abundantly clear that in the eighteenth century Choctaw chiefs led by what looked to Europeans like consensus (in the case of “peace” chiefs) and charisma (in the case of “war” chiefs), though it is probably not wrong to refer to their leadership qualities as partaking of a spiritual element. Over time some chiefs would consolidate considerable power, but even in the nineteenth century no single chief led the Choctaws.

Function/meaning of Peace/War

Does the explanation of peace and war leadership as consensus and charisma help very much? Again what we think is axiomatic may not be well-supported by historical evidence. We think that peace chiefs had relatively permanent leadership, while war chiefs were more likely to attain to significance only in time of war and to lose influence when active war was in abeyance. Ethridge has argued that during the colonial period there was an increasing premium on war leadership as Europeans chose to foster intertribal wars for their own ends, but it is difficult to know what must have been the case before the sustained presence and observation of Europeans. According to the lists of villages and chiefs assembled by French observers in the late 1720s and 1730s, most villages seemed to have at least one chief with some war-related semantic element in his name, and that chief was most frequently not the one considered by the French observers to have primary leadership (Galloway 1988).

If white and red map onto peace and war symbolically, do they also map onto the moieties? I think the answer is yes, but in a more complex way than saying that the groups of one moiety were all white and the other all red. For the Choctaw, there do not seem to have been truly “white” towns—sanctuaries where no violence was permitted—yet all village “peace” chiefs seem to have been able to maintain the peace most of the time within the precincts of their villages, while the powers of “war” chiefs seem to have been especially relevant to lands external to the village, thus implying that peace and war had a geographical mapping that crosscut that of the moieties (compare the Natchez Deer Festival in Swanton 1911). Moiety identity with peace and war, therefore, may have been metaphorical, and more closely related to the elder/younger dichotomy: the senior moiety was seen to be aligned with peace and stability, while the junior one was more like the “turbulent young men” who made the best warriors.

If O’Brien is right, and the war and peace functions were simply points along a continuum of male chiefly power, then it might be worth asking whether the Choctaw age grades might thus also have constituted an axis of duality. O’Brien emphasizes the rite of passage initiated by the youth’s first participation in war, but he ignores the fact that the status of “beloved” or “honored” man also amounted to an age grade attained through status transition, that the greatest chiefs tended to be found among those senior ranks, and the most respected among these elder chiefs were “peace” chiefs (possibly because “war” chiefs tended to get killed off). In fact almost none of the chiefs reported by Europeans were young in eighteenth-century terms: they began to emerge into lesser chiefly ranks and documentary visibility only in their twenties and thirties. It is notable that the few chiefs mentioned as being so inadequate that for one reason or another their villages replaced them are invariably described as young: I suggest that it was not their disinclination for war that made them unattractive as leaders, but their youth and lack of experience.

A final but I think significant consideration with respect to the expression of duality in chiefly power is the pairing of peace and war chiefs, both within a village and on a larger scale. It is the appearance of centralized leadership itself that most scholars have attributed to the effects of the European presence; O’Brien argues for it as one of the innovations wrought by Franchimastabé in the 1780s, using his talents in accumulating goods to build power among kin and dependents. Certainly we see the French attempting from the beginning to find and name a manipulable single chief to serve them as the funnel for their goods to the tribe and to hold responsible for its cooperation, but it is also true that this institution was far from easy to create, since power was persistently shared in some sense between chiefs who seemed to have the characteristics of peace/Inholahta and war/Imoklasha. The careers of the two pairs of chiefs considered here seem to suggest that the social mechanism of age sets among the Choctaw tended to throw up generational groups from which such pairs could and did emerge. The mechanism of the “play-off” system (Gearing 1962) fortuitously meant that pairs of chiefs could choose to manipulate external allies by working together or playing off each others’ talents and inclinations.

Blood/Semen, Blood/Milk: Blood Symbolism in the Construction of Gender and Power

O’Brien argues that the notion of dual organization, of moieties organized with a set of dualisms including war and peace and red and white, was far less significant in his scenario of market revolution than was gender, which he argues was the most fundamental duality. He has adopted the by now standard gender complementarity discourse that has substituted for earlier concepts of gender division of labor, which in its turn replaced a discourse of gender inequality. Its importance is that it is used to hold both genders to equal symbolic standards of “power.” In O’Brien’s argument, as we have seen, all males, of whatever moiety or iksa, were obliged to prove themselves through violent activity of some kind (war or hunting or perhaps the ballgame—“little brother to war”—which could itself eventuate in death), and all were theoretically obliged to shed blood to prove their command of the supernatural, whereas women, who already both shed blood naturally in proof of their fertility and by creating new life proved their command of the supernatural, were not obliged to do anything to prove their essential wholeness and spiritual power.

According to O’Brien and other researchers, a set of essentialist categories or “natural symbols” (Douglas 1973) cluster around the dual construction of gender in the Southeast. Several things are not clear here. First, although this concept seems to be conceived as a pan-Southeastern one, it is presented as in some sense a “natural” or baseline concept, even though the evidence for it was not gathered until much later and the southeastern Native people of the eighteenth century were in anything but a “pristine” cultural condition. The documentary evidence is very sparse when it comes to actual eighteenth-century observations, and is particularly thin when it comes to women. The observers’ enculturation in patriarchal societies made them nearly blind to female power and agency, and most of their observations of women were additionally filtered through male Choctaw informants (cf. Paper 1983; Churchill 1996; Perdue 1998). Further, the model suggests that women were “naturally” powerful and leaves them in a sense without any but bodily agency, with no evident field for the exercise of their power outside of childbirth (including the natural and symbolic birthing of Others into a Choctaw identity to assist in diplomacy) and horticulture; while men were compelled to demonstrate intellectual as well as bodily agency and were allocated the fields of war, politics, and trade for their action. This dichotomy is too fine a mirror of the documentary demographics of gender to be wholly convincing.

Clearly also, this structure, assuming that it did exist in the eighteenth century, was not likely to have been as solid and uniform as Swanton and after him Hudson made it seem: if menstruating Mikasuki women today are served on paper plates in the tribal cafeteria, while Choctaw women have adopted menstrual hiding behaviors, might there not have been significant variations in the eighteenth century? In other words, there is no pristine pan-southeastern belief or practice in the eighteenth century or at any other time, only constantly revised belief and practice with local variation, fitting the specific historical trajectory of each emerging tribal entity. It is clearly hypothetical to suggest a reconstructed gender essence, especially where the gender in question is notoriously underrepresented in the documents. For example, given the widespread existence of ceremonies surrounding a girl’s experience of menarche in all cultures, it would be surprising if there were not such a significant status passage for Choctaw girls to womanhood equivalent to that for boys to manhood, and the provision of ceremonial services during such a status passage by the opposite moiety is well-attested for other matrilineal societies (cf. Rosman and Rubel 1989). Nor does O’Brien’s scenario account for the politically significant status passage for men from active warrior status to that of “honored” or “beloved” elder and the doubtless symmetrical passage through menopause for women, both of which have clear implications for the practice of “power” in Choctaw society. In other words, the argument from gender dualism is not really needed to motivate a striving for spiritual power: it was a universal, not a gendered motivation.

When it comes to the definition of male power and its sources, it should also be remembered that most European observers had a vested interest in securing Choctaw cooperation in warfare and were more likely to value warlike skills themselves than peaceful pursuits. I am therefore not entirely comfortable with the emphasis on warlike skills’ being singled out as the sole route to power; I think O’Brien is on firmer ground than other exponents of this “fight club” scenario when he emphasizes that dutiful (and bloodless) participation in a war party that succeeded in shedding blood could suffice as proof of manhood, as well perhaps as hunting and the ballgame: all three activities, we should note, bear strong structural similarities to one another, and all involve moiety roles in other cultures. More importantly, they all represent a voluntary submission to uncertainty, providing a mechanism by which the favor of chance could be demonstrated. I submit that this is the real source of male spiritual power, whether observed by Europeans or not, but I also suggest that the favor of chance did not need to be demonstrated solely through killing or the shedding of blood and that there were two poles of male spiritual power.

Duality and Leadership

Chance could choose a man for another fate than that of a killer of men or a shedder of blood—hence a “peace” chief eventually forbidden to shed blood might negotiate his manhood status passage without having shed it in the first place. His actions upon entering the liminal status of a war party member within a voluntarily-accepted uncertainty could guide his personal outcome: he could emerge as primarily an instigator of open-ended situations or as primarily a restrainer of them. This would explain the widespread tendency to speak in terms of leaders who were “modern, innovating” or “traditional, conservative” that O’Brien so justifiably deplores. In fact, I would suggest, it was the nearly universal pairing of these two qualities, embodied in pairs of chiefs associated with “peace” and “war” or sometimes with the two moieties (at the village, division, or even tribal level), that represented the “wholeness” that women possessed (or that they achieved; and perhaps that they also articulated in two modes), and its political correlate was the ability to explore novel situations (red or war leadership) while remaining safely within the restraints of specific ceremonial restrictions (white or peace leadership). In terms of physiological “natural symbols” this even fits, since the “blood” of chance and death would be balanced by the “semen” of established practice and nurturance, just as women alternated menstrual blood with breast milk.

Conclusions

I would like to propose that these considerations of the various meanings of dual organization among the eighteenth-century Choctaw may permit the following conclusions:

1. The Inholahta/Imoklasha moieties probably articulated both originary ethnicity and geographic boundary definitions. They certainly did control at least acceptable marriage partnering and mortuary ritual, and may have been involved at least symbolically in other axes of duality.

2. All chiefs could be involved variously in war when necessary, especially during youth, but “war” chiefs properly so called were more directly involved on a sustained basis. When a divisional or polity leader was a “peace” chief, he used his “war” chief to organize the activities of war. “Peace” chiefs ranked above “war” chiefs in the Choctaw notion of an ideal leader, and at the highest levels these two ranks probably did map most appropriately onto the Inholahta and Imoklasha moieties, as in the cases of at least the first two pair of leaders I have discussed. “War” chiefs were symbolically “young” and “peace” chiefs symbolically “elder.”

3. Gender duality is not sufficient or even relevant to motivate male striving for “power.” Both genders were potentially symbolically complete, and both had to perform specific status transitions adequately and fill ascribed and achieved roles competently in order to reach that completeness, although the relative invisibility of women to European male observers, and the fact that much status transition activity took place “offstage” with respect to their observation, has masked this fact. Exceptional performance in the achievement of the appropriate variant of the gender ideal granted the individual in question what Europeans interpreted—when they saw it—as “power.”

4. Both male roles were selected through various status passage tests, during which potential “war” chiefs emerged as risk-takers and potential “peace” chiefs emerged as maintainers of order. These two categories tended to map onto the named moieties, but were achieved. In the context of age-grades, however, a man could potentially transition through both war and peace leadership during a life course, though at a lower and less visible level of activity.

If all this is true, then it may prove to be a larger metaphor explaining some aspects of social organization and definition in the Southeast. Eisenstadt (1989) has pointed out that the social division of labor beyond the household level of “primordial ascription” raises fundamental uncertainties about the construction of trust and solidarity, power without exploitation, and the meaning and legitimation of cultural models, and he has suggested that these areas of uncertainty tend to be articulated by different social actors. He observes out that the individual life-cycle entails the deconstruction and reconstruction of trust at several transition points to achieve the extension of trust into instrumental and power relations.This insight is clearly reflected in the variation in historically visible male Choctaw roles over the life-cycle. On a larger metaphorical scale it is also reflected in O’Brien’s argument that the progressive commoditization of the “market revolution,” to the extent that it began to alter relations of control over material resources among the Choctaw, could alter the workings of Choctaw society itself and reflexively the leadership roles.

But I would argue that this does not mean that this kind of fundamental dual organization must disappear, just because it is so fundamental, just because it articulates in a regulated manner the human will to reach into the unknown. In the mechanism of paired “war” and “peace” chiefs we see how this curiosity may be harnessed as the will to explore social design space, while establishing appropriate regulatory mechanisms to avoid “fatal” decisions. Neo-Darwinians argue that evolution is the problem-solving activities of life; Popper refers to history as the problem-solving activities of societies. Without straying into such a reification, I think it is not far-fetched to suggest that there is something Darwinian here: without having been explicitly designed in any way, the emergence and persistence of dual organization suggests that because it maintains this controlling tension it may represent a frequently achieved local maximum (or a peak on a “rugged fitness landscape”—cf. Kauffman1995) for innovation without danger of complete collapse.

References

Carson, James Taylor. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Churchill, Mary. “Understanding the Oppositional Paradigm in Charles Hudson’s The Southeastern Indians,” American Indian Quarterly 20(1996): 563-593.

Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 1973).

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. “Dual Organizations and Sociological Theory,” in Maybury-Lewis and Almagor, The Attraction of Opposites, 345-354.

Galloway, Patricia. “Where Have all the Menstrual Huts Gone? The Invisibility of Menstrual Seclusion in the Late Prehistoric Southeast,” in Cheryl Claassen and Rosemary Joyce (eds.), Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997): 47-62.

Gearing, Fred. Chiefs and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the Eighteenth Century, American Anthropological Association Memoir 93 (Menasha, WI: AAA, 1962)..

Hertz, Robert. Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1960).

Koehler, Lyle. “Earth Mothers, Warriors, Horticulturists, and Chiefs: Women among the Mississippian and Mississippian-Oneota Peoples,” in Cheryl Claassen and Rosemary Joyce (eds.), Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997): 211-226.

Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Schoepf (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967), 128-160.

Maybury-Lewis, David, and Uri Almagor (eds.). The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.

O’Brien, Greg. Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750-1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

Paper, Jordan. “The Post-Contact Origin of an American Indian High God: The Suppression of Feminine Spirituality,” American Indian Quarterly 7(1983):

Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women; gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

Reid, John Phillip. A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York University Press, 1970).

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan University Press, 1973).

Urban, Greg. “The Social Organizations of the Southeast,” in Raymond Demallie and Alfonso Ortiz (eds.), North American Indian Anthropology: Essays on Society and Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 172-193.

Weeks, Charles. Searching for Straight—and White—Paths: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791-95. Manuscript, 2001.

-----------------------

[1] I must remark here that Richard White’s picture of the rise of Soulouche Oumastabé as an exceptional career for a “commoner” is much exaggerated: he was not only not the only “Red Shoe” of his time, but he was not the only one who held a medal, and where other war chiefs were first chief of their villages, Soulouche Oumastabé was always formally subordinated to the man the French recognized as Great Chief of the nation, who happened to be his village chief as well.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download