Chapter Two: From Tribe to City

Conventional accounts of the city’s origins tend today to be stridently technological: they anchor the emergence of the city in the discovery of food cultivation, particularly its highly productive form of animal-powered agriculture. The city, it is assumed, appeared because of the large food surpluses farming folk could provide with the Neolithic technological innovations that marked the cultivation of the land. With this new material plentitude at their disposal, we are told, people began to detach themselves from agricultural pursuits and develop their skills as potters, weavers, metallurgists, carpenters, jewelers, and masons, not to speak of administrators, priests, soldiers, and artists. As agrarian villages increased in size and density, they are said to have reached a “critical mass”—often of undefinable size—that apparently qualified them to be called “cities.” Generally, we tend to regard the city itself as a sharp economic breach with the countryside, marked by a typically urban development of crafts, administration, and, to use a grossly denatured word, “politics.” This new, largely nonagrarian ensemble of activities produced what we like to call “civilization”: a literate world, culturally “enlightened,” presumably more rational institutionally and technologically than the agrarian, society on which, it relied—in short, what the distinguished Marxian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, called the “urban revolution/’

This conventional image of the city’s origins projects a highly modern view, largely ecbnomistic and progressivistic, onto the past. It assumes that because we are primarily, economic beings whose civic activities are deeply rboted in industrial, commercial, and service occupations, our urban “forebearers” gathered in towns and cities to follow similar pursuits. They, too, we tend to believe, conceived of the city as an economic enterprise, massively committed to nonagrarian tasks. We are prepared to concede that in a more “barbarous” era early city dwellers were also preoccupied with their safety or defense from rival cities or pastoral nomads. Hence, they congregated in great numbers behind defensive palisades and fortified walls. While defensive concerns might account in part for early urban density, they too were a function of economic concerns in modern eyes, just as we, today, assign economic motivations to what we also call defense by nation-states and imperialistic blocs. Thus we assume that our urban “forebearers” were very much like us. They were economic beings who were busily engaged in the pursuit of their material interests within the fixed confines of a structural and territorial entity called the “city.”

With equal alacrity we assume that just as they shared our economic lifeways (albeit in a more rudimentary fashion), they also shared our civic attitudes. Although we are likely to concede that their sense of communal loyalties was stronger than ours, we often believe that they judged their cities with a shared viewpoint like ours. However exotic many of their civic institutions seem in the light of our own, we tend to believe that their notion of citizenship was essentially as self-serving and self-interested as our own. They participated in civic affairs to the degree that their material interests were involved, and essentially their interests were no less economic than our own. Unwittingly, we subject their civic-mindedness as well as their “civilization to the very economistic class analyzes we profess to reject in the name of our “higher ideals” and “morals,” however much these are honored in the breach.

This view is greatly reinforced by the historical literature at our disposal. Athens, we are reminded, had its demos; Home, its plebs; the medieval commune, its popolo, just as we have our proletariat and lower middle classes who live in gnawing envy or hatred of their aristocratic and bourgeois elites. We are reminded that such Lorms as “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern” should not impel 118 to greatly distinguish the unalterable content of human nature, that human beings will seek to satisfy their egoistic impulses despite all their ideological avowals to the contrary. This excursion Into an unvarying psyche that lies at the core of human behavior defines the city dweller—particularly the citizen—with the same modern attributes that define our contemporary metropolitan dwellers. Hence, we comfortably sit back before the vast tableau of urban historical development with a sense of self-assurance that Our contemporary ills are as ancestral and incorrigibly “human” as our biological attributes and pathologies. They belong to us as assuredly as the human brain, human fingers, and ingrained human psychological traits that our species shares with its ancestors and with its heirs.

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If the city provides any evidence of human association and the immutability of human behavior, a serious account of its rise and development in no way supports this simplistic and conventional Imagery. It would be difficult to find one all-embracing reason that oxplains the emergence of a settled human collectivity such as a village, much less a population of thousands that we would expect to find in a city. The earliest cities archaeologists have unearthed do not seem to have been based on advanced forms of food cultivation, notably animal r powered plow agriculture, a point that Jane Jacobs has so ably highlighted in her book The Economy of Cities. Although it is doubtful that an “urban revolution” gave rise to an “agricultural revolution,” as Jacobs seems to contend, strong evidence exists that such very early cities as Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia and Jericho of Biblical fame may have consisted of sizable communities that acquired much, perhaps most, of their food from the hunting of game and the harvesting of undomesticated plants. Much plants as were domesticated seem to have been recent achievements of people who were harvesters of wild wheat varieties rather than experienced food cultivators. Bones of aurochs—the extinct ancestors of modern cattle—as well as those of wild deer, boars, asses, geese, and the skeletal remains of such predators as wolves, foxes, and leopards, suggest a “citified population of hunters and gatherers whose arts of gardening were of recent origin. By conventional standards, this economic tableau does not comfortably explain why a city such as Çatal, with an estimated population of at least 6,000 people occupying some 30 acres, should have been able to flourish on two nearby sites 9,000 years ago, many millennia before Mesopotamia became the region for Childe’s celebrated “urban revolution.”

If Çatal Hüyük is to be accorded a major place m the origins o the city, the reason for its existence—indeed, for its persistence for centuries—seems primarily to have been religious. Although the city was close to a rich source of obsidian that was almost certain y bartered for a wide variety of nonindigenous foods it is most conspicuous for its large number of religious shrines. James Melaart, who has provided us with detailed and richly interpretive studies of the city, found no less than 40 shrines among the 139 buildings he examined. These shrines were generally larger than the surrounding houses and decorated with elaborate religious artwork, paintings on opposing walls that symbolized death in one case and life in another...

Mellaart found no pottery in Çatal Hüyük—one of the principal hallmarks of Neolithic culture that, together with plow agriculture and domesticated animals, would normally be associated with a compact city of thousands. The thick walls of Çatal, its pueblolike houses, its small plazas, and its ornate artwork so visible to the public suggest an intensely vivid religious fife that is equally suggestive of an intensely active civic life. Its tool kit and higly naturalistic artistry suggest an ecologically oriented community of late Paleolithic hunters and gatherers rather than an early neolithic community of food cultivators. The culture is marked by a very sophisticated stone and bone technics, by markedly collective dwellings adorned with images of animals and shamanlike figures amid paintings of reindeer, leopards, and bow-carrying hunters. If we are to judge by the considerable amount of comment Çatal has elicited—owing partly to Mellaart’s own interpretations—the occupants of the city were strikingly matricentric in their orientation. Women figure highly in the symbolism of the city’s cults. The Mother Goddess is the most conspicuous figurine that we find among the city’s statuettes, and careful attention seems to have been given to the internment of women and infants in joint graves, presumably mothers and their children, a feature that is absent in male burials. Nor do hierarchy and warfare seem to be features of the city’s social life. Judging from the size of Çatal’s dwellings and the implements found in burial remains, the city was fairly egalitarian despite minor differences that are observable. There are no “obvious signs of violence or deliberate signs of destruction,” Mellaart observes for the original city and its nearby successor, both of which were simply abandoned for no apparent reason after centuries of occupancy.{2} Cases of violent death among the hundreds of skeletons examined on the sites are notable for their absence.

If the emergence of a city as large as Çatal Hüyük cannot be explained by a high degree of technical development or by warfare, it is interesting to note that an unknown people, already familiar with the arts of planting, harvesting, and milling grains, did not form any kind of permanent settlements on fertile soil as early as 18,000 years ago, when ice sheets still covered vast portions of the European continent. Evidence of food cultivators has been found quite recently adjacent to the Nile River at Wadi Kubbaniya in upper Egypt. They were planting wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas at a time when Magdelenian hunters were still wandering over the European tundra of Spain and France, leaving behind their celebrated wall paintings of animals in remote cave sites. The Wadi Kubbaniya people were not Neolithic farmers, although by every precept of technological or economic determinism they should have been. Their “diversified agriculture did not lead directly to the beginnings of village life,” observed Ferd Wendrof, Romauld Schild, and Angela E. Chase, who unearthed the remains of these early food cultivators. “Probably people continued their wandering ways as hunters and gatherers for thousands of years more. Farming was just one more resource in a broad-based way of life. These conclusions raise anew the question of why civilization emerged.”{3}

In fact, it is fair to say that both the Çatal Hüyük and Wadi Kubbaniya peoples, who may not have been particularly exceptional, raise the question, Why did “civilization” (more precisely, the drastic change from hunting and gathering to food cultivation and civic social relationships) emerge at all? This question seems shrouded in mystery because the changeover from one cultural form to another seems to be more drastic than it actually was. What Çatal Hüyük and the earliest food cultivators tell us is that the transition from tribe to village and city was not the predictable result, as archaeological orthodoxy would have it, of technological change or, as more recent theories would claim, of population pressure, war, or other drastic environmental pressures that might have produced hunger on a large scale. In short, the transition from tribe to city was not the necessary result of economists relationships that our Euro-American minds foist upon prehistory and history; nor was the transition, when it occurred, as deliciously complete and sharply delineated with polarities of a war between town and country as theoretical orthodoxy would have us believe.

Conversely, hunting and food-gathering peoples, who by all conventional standards of archaeology seem to have lacked the “economic base” for an urban society, actually formed sizable cities and initially used a technics more akin to late Paleolithic lifeways than Neolithic. As the anthropologists who studied the Wadi Kubbaniya sites conclude, “There does not, in fact, seem to be any single ‘cause’ for the beginnings of agriculture [and we may reasonably add, the city]. It may well have begun as a natural interaction between early peoples and the plant species they came to exploit regularly. It probably happened many times in the past, whenever Paleolithic peoples made extensive and sustained use of plant resources. It is important in this instance because the plants used [by the Wadi Kubbaniya people] were cereals, and these cereals provided the economic base for the development of our civilization. The rise of agriculture, however, did not lead rapidly or inevitably to identifiable social or economic change. It simply provided another resource in a broadly based hunting, fishing, and gathering economy.”{4} I find this conclusion, with its wayward suggestions and its shades of heterodoxy, all the more tantalizing because its authors do, in fact, use the conceptual framework and terminology of traditional archaeology with its recourse to such words as economic base, resource, and exploit.

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Which is not to say that cities congeal out of mere mist. Clearly a city requires a tangible food supply, one that is sufficiently plentiful to support such nonagrarian strata as artisans, administrators, and shamanlike priests to perform their specialties. If the remains of Çatal Hüyük and the Wadi Kubbaniya cereal farmers suggest anything, however, it is that early cities formed to meet cultural rather than strictly economic or defensive needs. The shrines so evident at Çatal suggest that the population of the city was committed to the performance of religious rituals, that cultic and priestly functions do more to explain why this city arose in Anatolia many millennia ago than do economic or military functions. Paleolithic lifeways; richly elaborated by time and environmental changes, may have been more tenacious than we have supposed them to be. They may have been more attractive to tribal peoples, even many self-anointed “civilized” ones, or, at least, more deeply rooted in the long evolution of human culture.

If this conclusion is sound, the urban and agricultural “revolutions” so closely associated in the archaeological literature with the rise of urban culture do not form an elegant fit by modern standards. The rise of cities may have had more to do with shrines, cultic practices, and temples rich in naturalistic symbols than with the “discovery” of cereal cultivation, plows, and domesticated animals. Not that the city gave rise to these agrarian basics, as Jane Jacobs seems to suggest. Apparently, agriculture in a simple form was known to hunters and food gatherers long before villages began to dot the landscape that phased from the Paleolithic into the Neolithic. But the shrine, later enclosed by a temple, may have been more authentically a harbinger of the city than the plow, and a quasireligious figure such as the shaman or priest may have been an earlier civic leader than the politically astute chief. By the same tokeri, the earliest “citizen” may have assumed his or her civic functions as a member of a congregation rather than, as a “resident” of an urban district. The earliest civic center, in effect, may have been a ceremonial area rather than a marketplace, a center for the worship of natural deities and forces.

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If this background accurately portrays the factors that gave rise to the city and the functions of its residents, it highlights many features of early city life that contradict modern economistic biases about urbanism, notably contemporary ones that visualize the city as a business enterprise and its concerns as primarily fiscal or commercial. Despite the highly sophisticated crafts that appear in cities as differently situated in time from our own cities as Çatal Hüyük, there is no evidence of the existence of an internal market within the community itself, and certainly very little beyond local barter. A considerable amount of trade may have developed between cities or between a city and an essentially tribal community. But trade inside the city itself was minimal or, at least, marginal. To summarily repeat Karl Polanyi’s rich probing into what he was to call “the anonymity of the economy in early society” and his compelling demolition of the view that the market was necessarily the decisive element in the founding of the city would exhibit a lack of appreciation for the thoroughness and elegance of his analysis.{5} Indeed, according to Polanyi, no domestic marketplace appears in early cities until Hellenic times, when the Athenian agora became a modest center for exchanges of goods as well as intense civic activity. Even so, Aristotle was to regard moneymaking as an “unnatural” urge that required public control and self-restraint. What early city dwellers actually exchanged with each other were services. More precisely, men and women cojointly contributed their share to the common fund of material goods. It was this shared pool of the means of life that constituted the economic life” of tribal communities and early cities. People contributed, in effect, their skills in growing food, in working wool and flax, in crafting metals and stone, and, by no means of least importance, their artistic and decorative talents in bejeweling and designing artifacts for deities, priests, and members of their own community.

“Postulates” of “self-sufficiency” and the distinction between “natural and unnatural trade” are not strictly archaic. We find them most self-consciously and philosophically stated in Greece. But prior to the full flowering of the Hellenic polis, material life in cities was deeply embedded in the blood ties, religious obligations, mutual loyalties, magical techniques, and the intensely naturalistic sensibilities of the tribal world. Guided more by custom than rationally vdiced strictures, these form the psychological setting and institutional carryovers for the more rationalistic civilization we later find in the Greek archipelago. This unconscious tribal and mutualistic substrate of obligation and association was, in fact, more forceful as a guide for human behavior than its formulation into a sophisticated civic and political philosophy or social theory.

In the so-called “primitive” or archaic worlds, more than food entered the “common pool,” Possibly, all things short of one’s closest possessions, including aspects of one’s very identity, had a highly collective aura that destined them to be shared or to be used communally. Initially, if the city had a pronounced function at all, it was a religious one. The strong emphasis that many anthropologists now place on political and centralized governmental forms as institutions for efficiently redistributing produce from ecologically different areas may be overstated. That great imperial systems, such as those of the Incas, Aztecs, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese, were centers for collecting and redistributing a great variety of goods from highly diverse and distant ecological regions can hardly be faulted as a reality. Indeed, by imperial times many ancient cities were as conspicuous for their warehouses as they were for their temples and palaces.

But such an emphasis on material function, like the highly deterministic strategies to explain the existence of every community within our purview, betrays a very modern bias. It reveals a proclivity, almost an unthinking compulsion, to assign a “material role” to every phenomenon, particularly every institution and form of association, that exists in the past as well as the present. Worse, it crudely downgrades the richly associative role played by material things such as gifts, which serve to foster a much deeper human attribute: the need to be grounded in community, to enjoy shared sensibilities that are spiritually supportive and without which authentic individuality is chimerical. Human personality, which is nurtured by parental care, kinship ties, friendship, and the assurance or security provided by personal support systems, becomes a material thing—a manipulatable object among many other objects and commodities—precisely when its immaterial support systems are subverted and its traits reified. Quite an opposite case can be made for the belief, so widely promoted by contemporary “cultural materialists,” that chiefdoms, monarchies, bureaucracies, armies, clerical hierarchies, and the unlimited investment they required were distributive agencies and processes that served humanity’s “needs,” mythic or real. It could be more validly shown that they reflected a mania for domination that created mythic “needs” and systems of control on a scale so harmful to the communities they were pledged to service that they and their legacy of waste, destruction, and cruelty now threaten the very : existence of society and its natural fundament, Indeed the domination of nature was to have its roots in the domination of human by human such that a credo of domination was to embrace the planet.

But an important caveat must be voiced here when we speak of a mania for domination that can so facilely be used to color our image of the early, essentially temple, cities at the dawn of civic life. By no means is it clear that the sacerdotal hierarchies that emerged in these cities from Erech in Mesopotamia to Teobhuacan in Mexico immediately led to a hierarchical restructuring of the fairly egalitarian tribal or village peoples on whom they depended—peoples who built their monuments, often massive in size; who created their plazas, dwellings, and altars; who filled their temple storehouses, erected their walls, and shaped the sculptures that dazzle the modern eye. That such vast efforts with their enormous mobilizations of labor could have been made for purposes that seem so “profitless” and “useless” by present-day urban standards without coercion of the most authoritarian kind seems unthinkable at first glance—so much, in fact, that all early temples and mortuaries are normally regarded as the work of savagely coercive rulers and brutal tyrants.

But if this imagery is certainly true well into history, we have no reason to believe that it reflects the social relationships that gave us our earliest cities and their cultic structures at the dawn of history. I have described elsewhere, in great detail, how an egalitarian society may have slowly phased into an increasingly hierarchical one-initially theocratic, ultimately feudal, and finally monarchical.[1] Here, I would like to emphasize that the earliest cities were largely ideological creations of highly complex, strongly affiliated, and intensely mutualstic communities of kin groups, ecological in outlook and essentially egalitarian and nondomineering in character. We do not know if a sizable city like Çatal Hüyük, which dates back 9,000 years, or a hugely monumental city like Teotihuacan, which was slowly erected around 300 B.c. and ceased to be occupied around 800 A.D., were originally constructed by forcibly “mobilizing” large numbers of “oppressed” villagers in surrounding communities or, surprising as it may seem, whether they were voluntary enterprises undertaken by devout “parishioners” who viewed their civic responsibilities as a sort of “calling.” We assume that a coercive strategy was followed by oppressive elites at the inception of city life because we read our literary accounts of Mesopotamian and Egyptian forced labor back into city lifeways in a misty preliterate era. It is easy to. overlook the fact that any literary tradition of urban, life, even the very early Gilgamesh epic that dates back to the beginnings of Mesopotamian city life, is already evidence of a technically advanced, often coercive, society. Çatal Hüyük, Jericho, Erech, Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, and Tikal, to cite cities far-removed from modern urban development in the cultured areas of the Near East and the Americas, are mysteries to us that we try to dispel with our own motivations and social interests. Yet their archaeological remains are rich with the evidence of ideological aspirations and human relationships that were fundamentally different from our own secular ones—cultic and communal sensibilities that viewed “the city” (if such a word can be used indiscriminately to encompass all sizable human settlements) as a monument to lifeways and sentiments that were basically different from our own. Possibly, the ordinary people who reared the monuments in the earliest of these cities were closer in their outlook to the medieval artisans who often willingly gave of their time and skills to slowly erect over generations the great cathedrals of Europe. In either case, they speak to a dedication that stands in marked contrast to the mentality of the engineers and construction crews who are seeding the modern world with high-rise residential and office structures in urban areas of every continent.

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We are confronted, too, with the differences between early and modern conceptions of “citizenship.” How did ancestral “citizens” of the first cities view themselves? In what sense were they different from us—or similar to us? By asking these questions, we encounter a problem that lacks the degree of completeness and fixity that we find in a physical structure such as the remains of a temple or palace. Citizenship, as we shall see, is a process, not a reality that is reducible to a concise, single-line definition. It does not leap into being from a vacuum, surrounded by streets for personal display, buildings into which the sovereign individual can retreat, and dense populations that foster personal intercourse. Çatal Hüyük, in fact, had no streets at all, to cite an intriguing feature of the city. A pueblolike city, it had small squares but no open byways. It lacked the streets that such modernists as Marshall Berman and Richard Sennett regard as the structural essence of urbanism, particularly in the form of wide boulevards in which the monadic ego of our time can display itself in dandylike fashion and assert its “individuality.” One moved from one part of Çatal to another over rooftops, ascending or descending ladders, entering into the recesses of dwellings and crossing small squares.

This is a significant personal fact, not merely a structural eccentricity. Çatal Hüyük must have been a highly collective community. It was intensely peopled—more like a tribe than what we, today, would call a city. Yet even by modern standards of urbanism such as size and density, it was a town, not a village. From a historical perspective, given time and place, it was even an immense city if archaeological calculations of its populations are remotely correct. What does this tableau mean? In what sense were its men and women “urban”? We can surmise that they were not mere “residents” of the city or the ancestral members of modern-day “constituencies.” They were not burdened by the anonymity and awesome sense of personal isolation that is the most characteristic trait of the modern urban dweller. In some sense, they were “protocitizens” of a highly articulated and richly textured community in which a high sense of collectivity, nourished by such organic facts as kinship ties and a sexual division of labor, was integrated with the civic facts of politically defined rights and duties. They were communities in transition between the biological realities of the tribal world, rooted in blood ties, gender, and age groups, and the political realities of the urban world, rooted in residential propinquity, vocational mobility, and legal prerogatives. Early cities probably did not contain citizens in the sense of self-empowered individuals ethically united by ideals of civic virtue, rational in their social policies, and completely free to participate through discourse and practice in the management of their cities—in short, those attributes that Greek social thinkers were to call phronesis, the practical reason involved in creating and managing a community. All the evidence we have of these protocitizens suggests that their power for social action was largely controlled by obligations to kin groups and theocrats, their ideals guided more by faith than reason, their sense of virtue more pragmatic than ethical, and their social institutions more biologically derivative than cultural in character.

Yet these seemingly uncivic features provided a crucially important matrix for what was to grow into the highly sophisticated classical notion of the “citizen.” If social empowerment seemed to derive more from such group attributes as the family or the clan than from personal attributes, the individual living in these cities enjoyed a real sense of power as such, not a body of conferred rights that were more formal and juridical than substantive. Tribal societies are known that exhibit a high degree of respect for individual uniqueness and free will, however much custom and public opinion seem to place limits on personal behavior. One cannot simultaneously deny the existence of primitive individuality while acknowledging the existence of a fairly spontaneous ego and considerable self-assertion among, say, certain hunting and gathering communities such as the pygmies of the Ituri Forest who include outrageously boastful men and extremely shrewd women. By their marked presence, such personal traits as boastfulness and shrewdness, indeed humor, gaeity, and reflectiveness, frankly contradict the conventional image of preliterate peoples as divested of ego and personality, the modern claim to individuality. The contemporary neurotic notion of personality may not have been as common among so-called primitives as it is today in the metropolitan areas of Europe and America, although by no means is it absent. But individuality certainly exists among remaining preliterate communities, albeit in a different form and faced by more overt constraints than our own, notably where the rules of the game are fairly explicit and mutualistic in contrast to our modern, highly engineered society, which bombastically celebrates its formal “freedoms” and tries to ignore its lack of social concern.

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Surprisingly, citizenship and the political forms that foster it would be difficult to explain without looking precisely at those primal organic institutions—particularly clanlike relationships, popular assemblies or the various councils that spin off from them, and the egalitarian outlook, in sum, the tribalism—that the city, in the conventional wisdom of the recent past, was supposedly designed to overcome. Rousseau was to pithily observe that “houses make a town but citizens make a city.”{6} Yet he would have been no less surprised than all the major social theorists of his day to learn that the most important attributes, of citizenship derive more directly from the tribal world than the village world, from rude shelters rather than houses. Houses may make towns, even huge urban belts that subvert the conditions for an active, participatory body politic, but simple huts and tents—the “primitive” dwellings of hunting, gathering, and pastoral peoples^—provided the homes for institutions and social types that often embodied the civic ideals we associate with citizenship.

Notions of human scale—of communities that are modest in size and comprehensible politically and logistically to their residents are distinctly tribalistic in character and origin. They are formed from the idiom of a civic mentality that is rooted in familial loyalties and’extended kinship relationships. Not surprisingly, many early cities, insofar as they leave any written account that is open to us, are. “founded” entities. Their “ancestry” originates in a shared deity or a delineative progenitor with some kind of personal embodiment. The Sons of Aeneas, the Trojan hero who “founded” Rome in the city’s urban mythology, are no different in principle than the Children of Israel and the Biblical Jacob who was the patriarchal ancestor of the Hebrew tribes. The word “citizen,” in fact, appears sporadically, or late in the history of cities. Quite commonly, the “citizens” of a community denoted themselves as “brothers,” a term in widespread use throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Men and women in the towns and cities of the past visualized their relationships in terms of familial connections. As “strangers” began to form the majority of urban dwellers in late classical and medieval cities, this familial imagery with its emphasis on smallness of scale, accessibility of person, and close-knit support systems of the kind we associate

With “humanly scaled” communities became the outlook and prerogative of urban elites, notably the municipal aristocrats and! nobles who staked out a real or legendary claim to the city’s “founder.” Ultimately, the newer, dwellers of the city, too, formed their own “brotherhoods” in which ties, rights, arid duties were solemnized by blood oaths and kinshiplike rituals. In time, the word “brother” became an ecumenical form of civic address and affiliation, spanning class ties and interests.

The civic institutions that we most commonly associate with a “participatory democracy” often reach back in almost unbroken continuity to tribal assembles. It is fairly certain that face-to-face assemblies of the people in ancient cities were often the keystone of the civic institutional arch and extensions of tribal assemblages with their remote origins in primitive egalitarian relationships. So, 100, the notions of consensus where it existed, prolonged discourse with its goal of arriving at a commonality of views, and a sense of agreement were pronounced features of such a radical political (lomocracy. By contrast, councils, the representative organs of assemblies, patently originate in the smaller assemblies of elders, chiefs, and warriors. As contractions of the popular assembly—the “voice of the people” as distinguished from the people themselves—they are ubiquitous features of a tribalistic view of the reduced assembly projected into republican concepts of self-governance.

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Yet here, too, I must add a caveat that initially seems to break the continuity of the development from tribe to city. The city may continue the traditions of the tribe institutionally into a rich skein of participatory, indeed ecological relationships, but it also constitutes its antithesis biologically. The city is the perpetuator of the kin group insofar as the latter is a parochial expression of blood ties I hut exclude the stranger—the outsider—who cannot claim a common ancestry with the brothers and sisters. Tribalism is equatable with familial exclusivity, not only familial solidarity. The distinction between exclusivity and solidarity is crucial here. Whether He live or real, tribalism has its universal solvent in blood, the medium that accords equality or isonomia (to use the Hellenic term) to its members. Theoretically, one does not join a tribe; one is born into it or, at most, adopted by it because of the services it requires. Adoption involves elaborate rituals that transform the outsider into an insider—an “inorganic” being, to use Marx’s formulation, into an “organic” part of the community.

The city breaks this biological spell, with its ecological aura, however fictive it may be in reality. It exorcizes the blood oath from the family with its parochial myths and its chauvinistic exclusivity, while retaining or reworking its concept of socialization. Paternity is given a high place in the civic firmament of values, but the fathers are slowly divested of their absolute powers over the sons—sons who are needed by the city to perform administrative and military services. The stranger is denied formal legal status in the city’s system of governance but is admitted into the magic circle of civic protection and solicitude, especially if bearing skills, wealth, and material resources.

But the ecological aura remains as legend by hypostasizing the city’s founders, the ethnic continuity of its citizens, the status of its rulers, although reality enhances the hidden powers of the newer residents who can claim no tie to the civic progenitors. Hence, the city creates a special kind of social space. A projection of familial and tribal forms, the city subverts the authentic substance of the parochialism that flavors kinship ties with a mysterious inwardness and rescues tribal institutions as ecumenical forms of civic administration. The Greek democrat, Kleisthenes, is almost a symbol of these shrewed maneuvers, maneuvers by no means unique to the Athenian polis. To break the hold of family ties that obstructed the power of civic institutions, the citizenry was organized into territorial “wards,” but each “ward’ was felicitously called a “tribe.” The municipal space of Athens, in effect, was expanded to create a largely civic citizenry, unencumbered by the mindless tribal obligations and blood oaths that impeded the rights of the stranger but in a form that wore the symbols and enjoyed the prestige of tribal tradition. Indeed, one of the great tasks of ecological thinking will be to develop an ecological civicism that restores the organic bonds of community without reverting to the archaic blood-tie at one extreme or the totalitarian “folk philosophy” of fascism at the other.