The Original Sin of Competitive Feasting
The Original Sin of Competitive Feasting
From Neolithic dinner parties to the "vast, existential inequality" of the Shang, as told by culinary ware. Part III of The Annals of Bronze Age Fusion
Competition over food and prestige containers was an important process contributing to an increase in social and economic inequality during the late Neolithic period of northern China. By the early Bronze Age, labor-intensive and ritually important food vessels played a key role in the political economy. Competitive feasting for acquisition of labor and resources by descent groups caused greater demand for labor-intensive ceramics and diversification in production.
Anne Underhill Craft Production and Social Change in Northern China
In The Ru Reinterpretation of Xiao, Keith Knapp makes the intriguing argument that the word xiao (孝), which is usually translated into English as “filial piety” and is a foundational maxim in Confucian ethics, originally meant something a bit different. During the Western Zhou (1045-771 B.C), writes Knapp, the word “largely focused on feeding a wide array of the dead through sacrifices.” Only during the Warring States Era (475-221 B.C.) did the meaning change to signify the respect and obedience a child owes to their parents, and even later, to the state.
I was struck by this observation because it conveyed a fresh sense of just how central rituals involving food are to classical Chinese culture. Of course, rituals associated with food are important to every culture, but the ways in which food traditions are inseparable from Chinese conceptions of about how to govern a state or properly live in the world resonate at a more explicit level than elsewhere. The suggestion that the Confucian stress on filial piety was a transmutation of the practice of honoring one’s ancestors with gifts of sacrificial meat and wine, underlines, once again, how food is Chinese culture.
This point is further reinforced by the reality that for thousands of years, dating back to at least the early Neolithic, the items most commonly found in burial tombs were culinary vessels.
Anne Underhill and other scholars have documented how sequential changes in the distribution and relative quality of these vessels mark the emergence of social stratification in Neolithic East Asia. At first, there is little variation to be found in grave sites, suggesting relatively egalitarian societies, but as we get later into the Neolithic, an increasingly smaller percentage of tombs contain larger numbers of “prestige” items, artifacts that required skilled labor to produce. The evolution of these prestige culinary vessels is striking, both artistically and in terms of sheer weight. By the time of the peak Shang, what began as simple ceramic drinking cups and stewing pots metastasized into intricately decorated massive bronze vessels concentrated in the tombs of the elite.
As noted in the last installment in this series, the spectacle of a society organizing vast resources to dig ore out of the dirt, forge enormous bronze vessels, and then bury those vessels back underground initially seemed to me a bizarre exercise in economic inefficiency. But according to Underhill, the truth was exactly the opposite for the perpetrators of this tradition,
“The burial of goods in ancient China,” writes Underhill, “especially food containers, should be regarded as an economic investment that continued lineal relationships and could enhance external relationships, rather than as the destruction of wealth.”
Residents of Neolithic and Bronze Age East Asia regarded the continuum between the living and the dead as extremely fluid. One’s ancestors were a source of status, power, and knowledge about the future. If you took care of them, they would take care of you. Stewing a pig or a steer in a giant bronze cooking pot and presenting it in an elaborate ritual to the deceased was a calculated financial transaction designed to boost one’s own present-day authority.
Underhill’s thesis is that the grand drama of peak Shang ritual (complete with large-scale human sacrifice) can be traced back to a culture of “competitive feasting” that gained momentum in the Neolithic, as competing groups strove to make ever-larger investments in their own welfare.
The most significant factor driving changes in craft production during the late Neolithic period and early Bronze Age, was, I propose, factional competition among descent groups for basic resources (good quality land, food surpluses, labor). This competition spurred competitive feasting in both residential and mortuary contexts, and production of greater varieties of prestigious food vessels, including increased production of food vessels exclusively for the dead…. A minority of households that could amass a surplus could use gifts of food as an effective means of acquiring labor for more than one purpose, such as farming, sponsorship of prestige goods production, construction of graves or houses, and defense… The ideological and social foundation for the development and expansion of state power during the early Bronze Age had been set.
The pressure to appropriately tap this ancestral “source of economic and ideological power” catalyzed an arms race in which “descent groups” sought out fancier and fancier ritual vessels with which to honor their forebears. Organizing the resources necessary to create these items – the ore, transport, artisans, et cetera -- required an increasingly complex society, and presents us with something of a who-came-first -the-chicken-or-the-egg conundrum. Did society become more complex – did “the state” form in the first place – in order to produce the ritual vessels so crucial to asserting status and authority? Or was the emergence of a complex and mature society initially required in order to be able to produce these increasingly more elaborate food containers? Whatever the case, the end result was, by the time of the late Shang, according to the archaeologist Roderick Campbell, the channeling of “unprecedented resources into rituals nominally for the collective good but in fact, productive of hierarchy and vast, existential inequality.”
The practice of “competitive feasting” is not unique to China. A review of the academic literature on feasting reveals that basically anywhere one might choose to look, the act of bringing groups of people together to eat and drink in extravagant fashion has been associated with an extraordinary variety of economic incentives and social maneuvering. One theorist even argues that competitive feasting initiated a process of surplus accumulation that was the original prime driver of economic growth, and thus responsible for all the ensuing disastrous ramifications that civilization has inflicted on the planet.
As Brian Hayden writes in his introduction to Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, “the drive to achieve advantages through feasting is probably the single most important impetus behind the intensified production of surpluses beyond household needs for survival… Transformation of surpluses created an entirely new ecological dynamic that has been consuming world resources at a geometrically increasing rate since the advent of trans-egalitarian feasting and prestige technologies…. This appears to be one of the most unique and distinctive capabilities that distinguish humans from the rest of the animal world.”
Feasting, therefore, is the root of, well, everything, everywhere.
But only in China do we end up with cooking pots becoming the premier symbol of state authority.
The major innovative achievement of Erlitou bronze metallurgy is the use of piece-mold techniques to make ritual vessels as prestige-goods production. Ritual vessels for drinking and cooking… were the most important medium used in ancestral cult ceremonies for enhancing the political legitimacy of the ruling elite. This tradition was continuously practiced by the dynastic rulers throughout the Bronze Age of China.
Li Liu and Xingcan Chen, The Archaeology of China
In The Drinks Are On Us: Ritual, Social Status, and Practice in Dawenkou Burials, North China, Christopher Fung analyzed the distribution of drinking cups in the burial sites of the early Neolithic Dawenkou culture that flourished from 5000-2500 B.C. in the region now known as Shandong province. His conclusion, based on the changes in the distribution and quality of the cups visible over the course of time, is that an “ideology of competitive funerary ritual” developed that “may have been a contributing factor in the development of social complexity in northern coastal China.”
The Dawenkou culture attracts attention because it is tempting to draw a connecting line between the Neolithic cultures that flourished in Shandong and the eventual rise of the Shang dynasty, the first Chinese state that we have a contemporaneous written record evidence for, and whose roots may trace back to the same general geographical area. There is speculation, for example, that cryptic marks found on Dawenkou pottery prefigure the Shang oracle bone writing system. Shandong is also the region which Anne Underhill mined for evidence for her thesis about competitive feasting.
The more we know about Neolithic China the more it is clear it is that there were multiple polities spread out across East Asia that were becoming progressively more complex throughout the Neolithic. The effort to single out any single area as the primal source of “Chinese” civilization is increasingly open to challenge. However, in the context of the importance of culinary ware to Chinese civilization, there can be no denying the critical importance of a single physical location in the Central Plains. Sometime during the first half of the second millennium B.C. skilled artisans living near the modern-day Henan province town of Erlitou developed a piece-mold casting technology and used it to make bronze versions of ceramic ritual culinary containers.
According to the archaeologist Katrinka Reinhart, “The first type of vessels to be cast out of bronze (at the site of Erlitou) were jue cups linked with wine and ancestral ritual.” Sometime later, similar techniques were applied to make bronze versions of the ceramic tripod dings that, during the Neolithic, writes the art historian Elizabeth Childs- Johnson, were employed “for presenting sacrifices of cooked meat to dead ancestors.”
The development of metallurgy is believed to have been introduced to East Asia from the northwest via contact with mobile pastoral cultures with a long history of metal-working. But the technology of piece-mold casting appears to have been independently developed by the Erlitou culture.
The remains of the Erlitou culture are often proposed to represent the legacy of the Xia, the “first” Chinese dynasty supposedly founded by the Great Yu. This is a matter of ongoing dispute. But as far as the archaeological record is concerned, Erlitou is where we find the first bronze ding tripods being cast, and there is a more or less direct line, visible in the aesthetic evolution of the dings over the second millennium B.C., that connects Erlitou with the late Shang. As dominance over the Central Plains passed from the Erlitou culture to the Erligang culture to the Shang, monumental ding tripods become an ever more prominent feature in elite burial tombs. There is even some evidence, argues Li Min, that these successive shifts in power were marked by the wholesale transfer of living metal-working artisans and their foundries to new locations. This transition at least echoes the assertion found in texts written a thousand years later that the physical transfer of the “Nine Tripods of Yu” marked the passage of the mandate of heaven from dynasty to dynasty.
Li Min also suggests that since “metallurgy and shamanism were closely linked in North Asia,” there was a “strong ritual dimension to metallurgical production at Erlitou: it reinforces the cultural perception of metallurgy as magical transformation in ancient society.” The containers to be cast in bronze were designed to facilitate the heating of alcoholic beverages to achieve the primary goal of elite “communion with their gods, ancestors, allies, and fellow elite.” Li goes so far as to hint that there might some kind of truth to the actual instantiation of the Nine Tripods: “Given the magical aura associated with the first metallurgical transformation, the idea of the Shang court curating a set of important bronze vessels from the Erlitou workshops as symbols of religious and political authority is not entirely inconceivable.”
So there we have it, the mightiness that was Shang evolving out of a succession of increasingly elaborate Neolithic dinner parties; culinary ware forged into state-affirming ideology; the transmutation of a basic human activity, eating together, into a driver of surplus accumulation.
As someone who, in his day, has thrown more than a few feasts, I often found myself wondering, as I researched and wrote these newsletter posts, how my own longstanding proclivity for gathering my tribe together and plying them with wine and flesh connected to this incredible East Asian competitive feasting arc. What species of civilization is being born in my smoker, or might be discernible in the ashes of my bonfires?
I first encountered the term “costly signaling behavior” from a journal article titled Red beer consumption and elite utensils: The emergence of competitive feasting in the Yangshao culture, North China.
In this study of feasting practices in the early Neolithic (3300-2900 B.C) the authors introduce their research as follows:
One of the approaches for explaining feasting behavior associated with the emergence of social differentiation is the Costly Signaling Theory (CST). It was developed in the framework of behavioral ecology, and explains that from an evolutionary perspective, unconditional generosity, wasteful behaviors, and actions for collective benefits often appear when there is a conflict of interest among individuals. People might compete to enhance social power by attracting potential mates and alliances, which would in turn increase their evolutionary fitness. Qualities such as wealth, social connections, and generosity are usually among the traits that potential mates and alliances look for. However, these qualities are often not readily perceivable, thus requiring advertisements or signals to make people aware of them. To advertise these underlying qualities, the signalers adopt costly behaviors like feasting or hunting large games. The high costs of such behaviors increase the difficulty of advertising, thus ensuring the evolutionary stability of these behaviors.
I am a believer in the idea that human identity is an ever-shifting kaleidoscope. We are all of us large and contain multitudes. Some are mostly, though not always, complementary: I am simultaneously a father, a writer, a cook, and a cyclist; some are more contradictory: I am a recluse who is content to stay home alone for extended periods and at the same time an extrovert who delights in large parties at which things get broken; I am disciplined and yet sloppy; a hoary elder and an exuberant child. I never feel like I stand on solid ground; my identities shift in the wind, clash and conflict and confuse. They do not resolve.
But if put to the sword and forced to choose one aspect to stand as my core, I doubt I would hesitate. I am a thrower of feasts. That is my purpose.
The personal is the archaeological. A key driver for all the research I’ve done in the last year on Neolithic China is the discomfort I felt when I first encountered the phrase “competitive feasting” juxtaposed with its culpability for the emergence of social inequality. Because, I too am a competitive feaster. My parties must have more drama, more amazing food, more brilliant and shimmering guests. The main sacrificial beast – a pig, a goat, a lamb – must engender awe. I am not content unless my parties spark myths and legends, most of which I author myself. I have ranked all my parties. I always strive for the next bash to top the charts.
Throwing such parties is an expensive addiction for a freelance writer. And not just in terms of cash. To gather the wood and assemble the bonfire pictured above required the labor of four men over three days. We then promptly burned all that energy up in one night, an act of economically inefficient consumption that bears more of a resemblance to the spectacle of a Shang queen buried with a ton of bronze than I am, in retrospect, comfortable with.
So I am a regular perpetrator of costly signaling behavior. And I’m here to tell you: it works. I have attracted mates at my parties, as have many of my guests. I have gained access to larger financial resources through my parties; I’ve gotten work and I’ve found jobs for attendees. I have definitely, though my labors, purchased a party-specific kind of status in my community.
Does this make me guilty of the kind of competitive feasting that leads to “vast, existential inequality? Is it people like me, always trying to build the biggest bonfire, sacrifice the largest animal, and accumulate the prettiest margarita glasses, who pave the way for resource depletion, social inequality, and the rise of an exploitive state?
On the one hand, yes, obviously. To be part of human civilization is to be complicit in humanity’s reshaping of the natural world.
This might be the point where it is relevant to mention that one very learned scholar of Daoism, Livia Kohn, proposes in her book, Pristine Affluence: Daoist Roots in the Stone Age, that the core of Daoism is a mirror of values shared by fundamentally egalitarian communities, perhaps dating all the way back to the Paleolithic, in which people got along in harmony. No war, no inequality, no exploitation. And then, competitive feasting and the rise of civilization screwed everything up.
Maybe it’s time to let go of my big bash fixations?
And yet --- people love a good party. Real community is built from sharing food and drink. There is value to convening gatherings beyond the status accrued to the host whose party goes off. And while it is true that competitive feasting pops up in the historical record all over the world, it is also true that there is plenty of evidence of non-competitive feasting, communal gatherings that build solidarity, that share collective bounty, that celebrate the major passages of life and death.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the reasons why studying Chinese archaeology is so fascinating is because there is enough of a material record on display over an extraordinarily extensive period to both ask and potentially answer fundamental questions about how things came to be, how civilization emerged from our random behavior. So we end up counting the number of dings buried in graves over the centuries and tracing their aesthetic evolution and telling a story about how the Shang became the Shang, and what it might mean to be Chinese. But just because things happened as they did, doesn’t mean they had to happen that way, or that the meaning of anything is fixed forever. Our own evolving awareness of what happened in the past should give us the tools to act otherwise in the future.
To make it personal, now that I understand the downsides of competitive feasting, perhaps I can, as I go forward, emphasize the parts of the feasting process that build community as opposed to inflate status. Stop the ranking and comparing and mythologizing. Focus on the fun in the moment.
To make it political, let’s explore the thesis that there is a way to trace the evolution of Chinese civilization from a starting point that doesn’t end up inevitably turning into the Shang. Let’s tell a different a story.
Let’s go to Sanxingdui.
Love the connecting of the personal with the historical!