Alpha Male Displays

[selenite0]

celticdragonfly and I watched Whale Rider the other night. It shows a poor Maori community struggling with keeping their traditions alive in modern times.

One scene showed the chief teaching some boys the Maori war face--eyes rolled back, tongue stuck out, grunting loudly--and explaining that it was a threat to crush and eat your enemy. celticdragonfly was boggled by that but I laughed and said it was a classic alpha male display, something I had a complete emotional grasp of. The movie ended with the men who'd gone overseas or lost themselves in crime or drink enthusiastically participating in the launch of a ceremonial boat as dancers showed the war face.

I liked the movie, it's a very moving story, but the ending bothered me. I started comparing the Maori tribal displays to the customers of the English who conquered them. The English middle class are famous for their lack of classic alpha male displays--the stiff upper lip instead of screaming rages, plain black suits instead of elaborate costumes, the protestant work ethic instead of conspicuous consumption. The progress of the societies was also very different. While the Maori stayed in the stone age the English developed ships that could go around the world and equipped them with cannon and muskets. But the English advantage wasn't just in military technology. Progress in agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, hygiene, and social organization put the English ahead of the Maori by any measure I can think of.

So what happened when the two cultures were living peacefully together? The English-descended New Zealanders were raised with the cultural tools to succeed in school and business. The Maori toolkit was optimized for beating off raiding parties and didn't help in those settings. So the Maori were outcompeted, failed, and turned to crime or drink. Or they would assimilate, leaving their traditions behind. Some would trade on their tradition for art or entertainment but this was condemned by the chief in the movie.

The movie ended with everyone participating in the traditional ceremony, throwing off their despair in a celebration of their heritage. But that's where it ends. I didn't see any reason to think that they'd be any more successful economically then they had before. If all this effort leaves still falling behind their neighbors they'll lose hope again and wind up where they were before the revival.

What they need is a new culture, one that gives them the tools they need to compete in the modern world. Not simply adapting English traditions--especially not the soccer hooligans--but adding new elements to their tradition. Most important would be respect for status from useful work instead of heredity or violent confrontation. An aggressive appreciation of risk could give them an edge over the risk-averse English business culture. Other possibilities are personal responsibility, holistic thinking, and testing assumptions against reality. I'd like to have more of those traits in our culture. But Americans aren't afraid of being outcompeted right now so there's not much pressure to change.

Oh--regardless of what you think of this, go see the the movie. It's good.

Comments

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Curiously enough, one of the areas that the Maori are completing with is intellectual properties - i.e. defending their culture and language against casual misuse.

Case in point is the Lego "Bionicle" line. When the line first came out, it had a story line made up of a mix of various myths from different polynesian cultures - including the Maori. The Maori challenged Lego regarding the Maorian elements, and Lego agreed to change them for future Bionicle toys.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Western world's alpha male displays are very much there - just subsumed so we don't *think* of them as alpha male displays. Right after college, when I worked in food service for six months (equipped with an anthropology degree, so I was thinking of these sorts of things), I was witness to many, many alpha male competitions. They were over who was going to pay the check. Whenever two families were eating together, invariably when it came time to pay the two husbands would get in a fight over who would pay the check. I was annoyed as hell by these, since all I wanted to do was operate the cash register and get them out of there, so I'd sit back and watch them fight it out. And when one of them won, the other one would actually be angry, or at least annoyed. Once I figured out that this was a classic alpha-male thing, it ended up being more amusing than annoying. :)

The other interesting thing I figured out the previous summer, working the cash register at a museum. We'd get these Hispanic families coming up, with the man strutting up to the cash register and ordering the tickets for his wife and children. So far, expected - the Hispanic culture tends to be male-dominated and the culture of machismo is very strong. But then he'd always turn to his wife, and tell her how much it cost, and'd *she'd* make the final decision as to whether or not it cost too much, and *she'd* get the money out of her purse and give it to him to pay me. Reminded me a lot of traditional Japanese culture, where the husband turns his paycheck over to his wife and she controls the purse strings.

And I've sort of lost track of what I was really talking about, since I was cooking and had to open a bottle of wine to put a cup into the pot, and after that there was this open bottle of wine and if I didn't drink anything it'd just sit in the fridge and go bad and things just sort of went on from there.

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

While the Maori stayed in the stone age the English developed ships that could go around the world and equipped them with cannon and muskets. But the English advantage wasn't just in military technology. Progress in agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, hygiene, and social organization put the Maori ahead of the English by any measure I can think of.
I think you reversed some nouns in there.

As for the stone age part, I'm still unclear as to the reasons for this. If New Zealand lacks sources for tin, copper and iron, it may have been simply impractical to develop, rather than cultural. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it, because they were very happy to kill each other and if metal weapons were available, they'd have taken the option.

That said, they also gave the British probably one of their hardest fights ever. They picked up firearms faster than anyone I can think of, reinvented trench warfare, and there were times when the British regiments engaged in protection, pacification and expansion had 3 generations of a family serving. It was a hard struggle, and given I can't think of anyone who Successfully resisted, it's not one to be ignored.

Then again, the afermath part is different.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Western world's alpha male displays are very much there - just subsumed so we don't *think* of them as alpha male displays.

Definitely. I think the secret of our success has been to channel that into socially-useful displays (ie, taking on high-paying unpleasant jobs to outspend rivals) rather than zero-sum ones like club fights. (I got this theory from Nonzero (http://www.nonzero.org))

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Ooops. Typo fixed, thanks.

I think the lack of Maori metal-working is more due to poverty/underpopulation than resources. There's a lot of iron ore there but developing new technology needs a critical mass of new-idea people and the economic surplus to let them spend time experimenting. Once you get a feedback loop going new tech supports more people and provides more surplus to enable more tech development, but until then you can stay trapped in a steady state. Constant warfare can eliminate any surplus and keeps people in combat instead of trying to melt rocks. (Nonzero, linked above, gets into this)

I'd heard of Maori resistance to the British, hadn't realized it was that fierce a fight. I'm not surprised though--open warfare is apparently what they're best at. The question is how the Maori can adapt to more subtle types of competition.

Regarding transgender roles

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, letting a female take a masculine role in the hereditarily-male rituals is necessary to keep the ritual from dying out. We would have lost Morris Dance entirely during the World Wars if women had not learned, danced and preserved it, and wasn't that a scandal?

There are some who maintain that it would have been no great loss... but any loss of anybody's culture diminishes all of us.