w/ Laihall: The Secret of Societies (Brian Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory, NW Turtle Island, 2018)

It’s not every day that you get to learn about a whole new mode of production, or phase in the meta of class society—much less the earliest one that we are (possibly) able to reconstruct or learn anything about—but here we are. Coordinating with anthropological data (problematically enough collected by and for settlers during the narrow window in which any Indigenous person would both still know the pre-contact forms firsthand and be willing to record them for posterity) from around Turtle Island, Africa, and Polynesia, archaeologist Brian Hayden argues that we should read late-Paleolithic archaeological sites from the cradle of so-called “civilization”—Palestine, Syria, Turkey, France, Britain—as preserving relics of secret societies, proto–ruling classes that arise in early societies with some surplus, around feasting and/or performing arts like dance or theatre, to play a central role in what is known as trans-egalitarian or complex hunter-gatherer relations of production, and subsequently more or less secretly appointing the chiefs or kings who seem to rule in the early state. By staging extravagant feasts and spectacles of both their own spiritual and cultural power and the (often imaginary) terror and threat that the community would face without their esoteric knowledge, secret societies are able to build engines of accumulation of material surplus wealth on their own part and of debt on others’. However, as the Davids point out in The Dawn of Everything, many of the transegalitarian societies still extant in modernity (as well as many ancient ones) can just as easily be read as hard-won instances of actually existing full communism for their time and place, and any given secret society may have really functioned to limit class struggle as they indeed claim in modern indigenous contexts. Moreover, the 19th-c. anthropologists were all on the payroll of the settler banks and development companies for good reason, so their “data” cannot simply be taken as “given”. Also, the fact that these rituals sometimes involved human sacrifice, and at least the claim of ritual cannibalism, continues illogically to be used as justification for ongoing colonization and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Accordingly, we approach this subject under the guidance of a real live member of a dance group in a potlatch society of Northwest Turtle Island, as well as an anointed member of the Kingless Generation: Laihallll.

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