The Creation Of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set The Stage For Monarchy, Slavery, And Empire - Plot & Excerpts
No sooner does one social segment achieve elite status than its privilege is challenged, forcing it to resume its quest for supremacy. Cycling between ranked and unranked was probably common in the preindustrial world. Eventually, however, the leadership roles in some societies became hereditary in perpetuity. One part of the world where hereditary rank flourished was the South Pacific. To be sure, most Polynesian islands were colonized by people from places that already featured some degree of inequality. On a number of archipelagoes, however, the level of inequality continued to escalate after the first canoes arrived. Anthropologist Irving Goldman once took a close look at 18 Polynesian societies. He succeeded in identifying three widely shared sources of chiefly power. All Goldman intended to do was break down hereditary Polynesian leadership into its component parts. Afterward, by recombining those parts in different ways, he hoped to account for the variety in Polynesian societies.
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