Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The earliest human groups were egalitarian hunting and gathering communities, organized around rituals devoted to some animal that was simultaneously food source, sacred object and ancestor. No wealth can be accumulated or political hierarchy established, as all social relations are organized by ritual and kinship relations enforcing traditional and roughly equal distribution of resources. The first significant transformation of human order attended to by Gans (primarily in The End of Culture, but he returns to this in Science and Faith) is the emergence of the “Big Man” studied by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and others. The Big Man, through enterprise, discipline, and what Gans calls “producer’s desire” accumulates goods and prestige that place him above the egalitarian community. The Big Man marks the beginning of wealth accumulation, individual liberty, and social hierarchy. Even more, the Big Man usurps the ritual center of the community, taking on a sacred status, ultimately becoming a kind of God King (this is really the origin of the scapegoating phenomenon studied by Girard). Gans distinguishes “producer’s desire” from “consumer’s satisfaction” to distinguish between competing dispositions within the egalitarian primitive community: on the one hand, to imagine the community as a whole, and take the initiative to attend to its ritual representation; on the other hand, to enforce the equal distribution of shares of the community’s product. It is the producer’s desire that is manifested in the Big Man, and the “consumer” both relies upon and resents the “producer.””

— Adam Katz, The Anthropoetics of Power · Essays & Articles