How does an egalitarian society change when it is able to produce a vast surplus?
Drawing on the oral traditions of the Enga people of Papua New Guinea, Polly Wiessner will ask: How reliable is oral history as evidence for long-term economic change? Does ritual respond to economic change or help drive it? What does the emergence of hierarchy do to egalitarian values? And, more particularly, how did the arrival of the sweet potato alter migration, warfare and exchange?
Polly Wiessner is a Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University and the University of Utah.