Concepts of Paternalistic Culture and Cultural Paternalism in the Age of Neolithization

Abstract

The paper examines the indicators of paternalism in archaeological remains from the Neolithic period. At this time people moved from the Mesolithic mobile to the Neolithic sedentary way of life, that is, from a hunter-gatherer to a producer economy. Neolithisation involves two processes: 1) the emergence and development of the Neolithic in primary areas and 2) the spread of the Neolithic into the surrounding areas. Paternalism is viewed through the concepts of paternalistic culture and cultural paternalism. Paternalistic culture is here explored through the qualities of paternalistic leadership on the Early Neolithic remains of the Pre Pottery Neolithic (PPN, c. 9700-6250 years B.C.) of the Fertile Crescent. Manifestations of the PPN period, such as public buildings, squares, communal (mortuary) rituals and feasts, equal mortuary treatment of all, as well as a common ancestor, paraphernalia and prestige items, can in certain contexts be understood as indicating a family atmosphere: close and individualized relationships within the community, leaders involved in the non-work domain, expecting loyalty and maintaining status, which are all characteristics of paternalistic leadership. Cultural paternalism, when one group imposes its own culture on another group with the intention of advancing its way of life, is explored on material remains that originate from the area of the Iron Gates (in the Danube Gorges, border between Serbia and Romania) from the transition of the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, c. 6200-6000 / 5950 years cal B.C. The paper examines how local Mesolithic communities embraced the culture of the surrounding Neolithic population that inhabited the Morava, Middle Danube, and Tisza valleys. The period represents cultural hybridity in this region, given that subsistence patterns and mortuary practices continue from the preceding Mesolithic period, while new forms of material culture, such as ceramics and novelties in stone and bone tools, appear in trapezoidal houses of older tradition. Individuals of nonlocal origin appear in the Late Mesolithic, and their numbers increase over the course of Mesolithic-Neolithic transformations. One model suggests that Neolithic communities coming to southeastern Europe treated other communities as if to domesticate them, which bears connotations of paternalism. The question is whether the prolonged process in which local hunter-fisher-gatherer communities abandoned their characteristics and embraced material culture as well as the newly arrived people was voluntary or inevitable. The answer may lie in the remarkably sculpted fish-like boulders discovered at the Lepenski Vir site dated to this stage. The emotions of fear and sadness that can be read on their faces may indicate an unwilling acceptance of new Neolithic cultural elements, and suggest that cultural paternalism was part of the process of Neolithisation.