interests became more and more separated from public interests until today we hardly know what a public interest is.
Students who look for the point at which economic activity and social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch: it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. As the power figures got more and more ascendancy vis-a-vis the group, they could take a £xed portion of the surplus with less involvement in the life of the people. The classic potlatch, as practiced, say, among the Kwakiutl, was a redistribution ceremonial pure and simple. It embraced the twin urges talked about in Chapter Two, heroism and expiation. The more goods one could amass and give away, the greater a coup of oneupmanship one pulled off, the more power one could generate, the bigger the personal victory. The object was to humiliate rivals, to stand out as tall as possible as a big man, a hero. At the same time, the grander was the expiation before the community and the gods to whom the goods were offered. Both the individual urge to maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served. But this classic social ceremonial had to change with the gradual development of hereditary privilege, so that the chiefs became the principal takers and destroyers of goods. In this way a feudal struc ture could naturally develop.16
Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see i as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the invisible world of the gods to a flaunting of the visible world of things. Again, it is only natural that once the god became visible in the person of the king, his powers became those of this world visible, temporal powers in place of invisible, eternal ones. He would come to measure his power by the piles of things he actually possessed, by the glory of his person, and not, as before, by the efficiency of the ritual technics for the renewal of nature.
This represents a basic change in man's whole stance toward the world, from a partnership with animal spirits, a sharer in nature's bounty, to a big boss, a darling of the gods. Hocart calls it the "growing conceit" of man, and we know that this
hubris
comes directly from a belief that one's own powers are more important than anything else. In the old totemic world picture individuals did not stand out as much. There was belief in the fusion of humanand animal spirits, a kind of spiritual unification of the life of the tribe with a sector of nature. Out of the invisible world of spirits life tumbled in an endless cycle of embodiments and returns. The individual got his sense of self-expansion and protection by sharing in the collectivity of social and animal souls, in the clan and its totems. I don't want to get tied up in an argument with modern anthropology about what exactly totemism is or isn't, or even, as Levi-Strauss questioned, whether it existed or not. What is certain is that spirit beliefs permeated primitive society and with them the sense of some kind of mystical participation with animals and nature,
a participation for the purposes of the control and renewal of life.
The individual got a sense of organismic durability by identifying with the fund of ancestral spirits. What also seems certain is that the entire community functioned as a kind of regenerative priest hood, as each member had a share in the ritual. o
The shared communal ritual recedes before the chief or king as he comes to control and centralize it in his person. The "conceit" comes in when he himself becomes the guarantee of life and it is no longer the group as a whole. We might put it this way : in the classic potlatch the accumulation of visible power was certainly there in the piles of goods, and it was very c
o
mpelling and meant to be so, but it had not yet taken the ascendancy over the group, had not yet upset the shared dependence, the reliance on gods and spirits, animals and ancestors. But with the historical detachment • This step in social evolution raises some fascinating questions about the basic nature of man and his attitudes toward the world around him. Often these days we tend to romanticiz
e about how primitives "naturally" respected nature and animal life and handled them gently and reverently. Certainly this was often true, but we also know that primitives could be very casual and even cruel with animals. Hocart throws an interesting light on this by point ing out that once man got enough power over the world to forgo the old totemic ritual identifications, he became more and more eager to disclaim any relationship with animals. Hence the eclipse of animal identification historically.We know that primitives used animals in the ritual technics, but Hocart says this doesn't mean that they always revered them or that respect was the primary thing : the primary thing was identification for use. This would ex plain why, once man got more secure control over the visible world, he found it easy to dissociate himself entirely from animals. Otto Rank has discussed brilliantly the change from Egyptian to Greek art as the gradual defeat of the animal by the spiritual principle, the climax of a long struggle by man to liberate himself from his animal nature. See Hocart, K, p. 146, KC, pp.
53-54, SO, p. 35; and Rank, Art and Artist ( New York: Knopf, 1932 ) , pp.