Leadership and Violence in the Small-Scale Societies of New Guinea

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Acquiring Status and Power in Transegalitarian and Chiefdom Societies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The degree to which leaders of egalitarian and trans-egalitarian societies deployed violence to achieve and maintain their position has long been a matter of anthropological and archaeological discussion. I investigate this issue using a database of political information drawn from 148 New Guinea societies ranging from hunter-gatherers through Great-Men and Big-Men cultivators to petty-chiefdom fisher-folk. I find that, in general, would-be New Guinea leaders sought to acquire and weld their need for influence to an aura of prestige. To lead, they commonly had to exert pressure on others, an exercise with the obvious potential to provoke resistance. To forestall resistance, therefore, they simultaneously sought to garner prestige by providing abundant prosocial benefits to their community. In most New Guinea societies, in other words, leaders did not resort to violence, whether advancing their own agendas or those of their communities. But some did. Some of these more violent leaders may simply have been incompetent, failing to recognize where they should draw the line. Other cases, however, point to how violence might emerge from a context of consensus leadership to become a more conventional instrument for acquiring and maintaining power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Acquiring Status and Power in Transegalitarian and Chiefdom Societies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50964