Ever since Enlightenment thinkers began promoting the values of equality and individual autonomy, hierarchy has been getting a bad press in Western academia. Recently, however, scholars have begun reappraising hierarchy, and anthropologists have been at the forefront of this effort (Ferguson 2013; Haynes and Hickel 2016; Peacock 2016; Rio and Smedal 2009). Writing about hierarchically organised communities in Africa and Asia, anthropologists have shown that, for many people, hierarchy often counts as a good thing. Township dwellers on the Zambian Copperbelt, for instance, value patron–client relations as a means to social mobility (Haynes 2017); in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal, respecting seniority-based hierarchies is deemed necessary for human flourishing (Hickel 2015); and in northern India, hierarchy is a normative idiom through which people pursue social ambition (Piliavsky 2021).
The reappraisal of hierarchy is most welcome as it helps us better appreciate one wide-spread conception of the human good (Robbins 2013). More work is needed, however, on three fronts. First, previous accounts have mostly talked about the instrumental benefits of hierarchy—things like care, protection, or social mobility. These goods are ‘external’ to hierarchy in the sense of Alasdair MacIntyre (1981: 219): under certain circumstances, it happens to be the case that the best way for realising, say, social mobility is by attaching yourself to a patron. But that doesn't mean that social mobility could not also be realised outside of hierarchy; under different circumstances, acting autonomously may be more effective than being a client. To fully appreciate what people value about hierarchy, we also need to ask about the goods ‘internal’ (MacIntyre 1981: 219) to hierarchy: goods that can only be realised by participating in hierarchical relations. Second, more attention needs to be paid to the ills of hierarchy as locally perceived. It is true that earlier critiques of hierarchy were flawed for projecting Western standards onto other traditions; we cannot simply assume that people everywhere wish to be equal and autonomous individuals. But that doesn't mean that people living in hierarchical settings do not have their own critiques of hierarchy. Rather than being seen as an unmitigated good, hierarchy is often surrounded by ambivalence. We can see this when people make deliberate steps away from hierarchy, only to then find that egalitarianism has its downsides, too (e.g., Tuzin 1997). Third, to better understand the ambivalence surrounding hierarchy, we should examine what in a given hierarchical system leads to the realisation of either positive or negative states. This requires complementing a focus on structure with one on process.
I address these tasks through a case study of the Aari of highland southwestern Ethiopia. Sedentary agriculturalists with a patrilineal kinship system, Aari have long practised a hierarchical way of life. Since the 1990s, however, this way of life has lost followers as many Aari have converted to Evangelical Christianity. Converts claim having converted to escape what they describe as the main problem of the indigenous way of life: the frequent breakdown of harmonious relations among kin. But while they praise Christianity for having reduced disharmony, they lament a concomitant decline in ‘love’ or affectionate interaction. This allows us to ask what it is about Aari hierarchy that gives rise both to frequent conflict and intense love. The answer, in brief, is grace.
I show that in the Aari way of life, relations among kin are animated by a distinctive conception of grace. This is the conception that those higher up the kinship hierarchy dispense blessings to their juniors, and that juniors receive blessings by grace not by merit. As founts of grace, seniors assume being entitled to juniors’ endless honour and gratitude, an assumption which often creates conflict and disharmony among kin. But seniors’ search for honour and gratitude has a socially productive side, too: the demands seniors make on juniors create occasions for sociability and intense, affectionate interaction. With conversion to Christianity, the source of grace shifts from seniors to God, and seniors’ demands for honour give way to humility. This means fewer tensions and hard feelings but also a less engaging social life.
A focus on grace, then, proves crucial to understanding Aari's ambivalence about hierarchy. At the same time, the Aari case affords insights on what the editors call the ‘sociality of grace’ (see Introduction). Other contributors to this Special Issue have answered the editors’ call to think about the relational dimension of grace by showing how certain forms of relatedness give rise to the concept (Steinmüller) or experience (Breen, Itzak) of grace. The causal arrow here runs from sociality to grace. I argue that it can also run from grace to sociality: my ethnography shows that different conceptions of grace entail different forms of relatedness. I begin by laying the theoretical foundations for this point before developing it through a discussion of Aari hierarchy.
Relational Grace
I understand grace as an answer to a general human question. The question is how we come by the good things in life: health, prosperity, offspring, friendship, and so forth. One answer highlights merit: we attain good things by our own exertion and cleverness. Another set of answers suggests that good things come to us unmeritedly. This may be understood as a matter of ‘chance’, ‘mechanism’, or some other impersonal force. Or it may be understood as a matter of gift: we receive good things from a giver. Where people understand good things to come to them as unmerited gifts, we can speak of ‘grace’.
The notion of grace as an unmerited gift contains three ideas. (1) A gift of grace is irreciprocable; it cannot be fully returned. If the gift was reciprocable, it could be merited retroactively and would therefore not be unmerited. (2) A gift of grace is unilateral: since it cannot be reciprocated, it flows only in one direction, from giver to recipient, not back to the giver. (3) A gift of grace is given out of ‘love’, ‘benevolence’, or some other selfless motivation: the giver of a gift of grace does not receive equal or greater value in return and does not stand in a relation of indebtedness to the recipient. The act of giving must therefore be motivated by a desire to foster the recipient's wellbeing as an end in itself.
What the notion of grace as an unmerited gift does not imply is an absence of obligation. This is sometimes misunderstood when grace is too quickly identified with the concept of a free gift. It all depends on how we define ‘free gift’, of course, but often anthropologists (following Derrida) have taken a free gift to be one that does not ‘lead to a sense of debt or obligation’ (Laidlaw 2000: 621). Receiving a gift of grace, however, can and often does create a profound sense of debt or obligation. (Think of the obligation Christians feel to respond to the sacrifice of their Saviour.) The obligation is not to ‘reciprocate’, for this is impossible. It is to ‘acknowledge’, to ‘give thanks’, to ‘show gratitude’. As Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992: 217) says, ‘whenever a favor has been done the return of grace is always expected, whether in the form of a material manifestation (regardless of the material value of that which is returned) or merely in verbal expression’.
The obligation to acknowledge grace also becomes visible when it is breached; failure to return grace is sanctioned by a loss of favour. God's wrath is incurred by those who, even though they know him, do not glorify him as God nor give thanks to him (Romans 1:21). And Pitt-Rivers (1992: 236) notes that, ‘the refusal to return grace entails automatically negative grace’, for ‘the slight represented by the failure to return grace provokes sentiments of resentment’. Grace, therefore, must be returned if it is not to be lost. While we cannot through our own works attain the things received only by grace, we can by our own fault forfeit them.
That gifts of grace create obligations on the side of the recipient explains why grace—contrary to the ‘free gift’ which ‘makes no friends’ (Laidlaw 2000)—does create relations. The type of relatedness entailed by grace, however, is not always the same. This is because grace is not always the same: local theories of grace can differ because there are different ways of answering the questions that arise where people understand the good things in life as unmerited gifts. These questions concern issues such as the following: (1) What is the (ultimate or proximate) source of grace—is it God, the emperor, ancestors, senior kin? (2) What is the domain of grace—is everything an unmerited gift, or are some things attained by chance or merit? (3) What are the means of grace—through what substances, practices, institutions is grace mediated to us? (4) What are the prerequisites of grace—what needs to be done or avoided to not foreclose the possibility of receiving grace? Depending on how these questions are locally answered, social life takes different forms. For example, as my ethnography shows, different forms of relatedness ensue depending on whether grace is received from God or from human superiors.
The ethnography that follows is based on two years of fieldwork (2015–2017) in the rural Aari community of Dell. Located on the southwestern fringes of the Ethiopian highlands, Dell has a population of around four thousand people, living in dispersed homesteads surrounded by fields. While two thirds of the population are evangelical Christians, one third continues practising what is locally understood as the ‘traditional’ culture or way of life, known as karta. I begin by talking about this traditional way of life and the ideas of hierarchy and grace that animate it. For readability's sake, I refrain from putting terms like traditional or traditionalist in inverted commas, although the usual caveats apply: karta is not unchanging, capitalised Tradition; it is just that which happened to already be there when Christianity appeared on the scene.
The (Negative) Grace in Aari Hierarchy
Not long into my fieldwork, I found myself sitting next to Birru, Dell's most eminent ritual expert. The setting was a dingy drinking house in the main village, frequented mostly by traditionalist men. Several of the men had just come up to Birru, paying reverence by kissing his knees and giving him bottled beer. As if to comment on these proceedings, Birru now took hold of my hand and began naming the fingers. The middle finger is the king (babi, lit. father), he said, the index finger a ritual expert (godmi), the ring finger a senior brother, the small finger a junior brother, and the thumb a lower-caste person (manna). With a sudden, sharp pull at my thumb, Birru revealed the point of his taxonomy: you can't lengthen a thumb by pulling at it, he observed gleefully, just as you can't turn a ‘below person’ (tamabab) into an ‘above person’ (zermabab): manna will be manna, kings will be kings, and younger brothers will not rise above their seniors. Hierarchy, Birru suggested, is a fact of nature.
The view stated by Birru has long marked Aari conceptions of the social universe. For those who still subscribe to this view, hierarchy is an aspect of more or less all social relations. This applies for relations among members of different status groups, like commoners and ritual leaders, or low-caste and high-caste people. And it applies for those related by blood or marriage. Thus, within patrilineal descent groups, no two people are ‘equal’ (yekka) but everyone is either ‘above’ or ‘below’: parents are senior to children, older siblings senior to younger siblings, and the children of a first wife senior to those of a second. Similarly, husbands are senior to wives, and wife-givers senior to wife-takers.
What sustains this hierarchical view of the universe? Central here is a particular conception of the sources of life. This conception suggests that everything good comes from above. Those further up the hierarchy have the power to ‘bless’ (anj), and with their blessing come health and fertility, growth and prosperity: I owe my children, livestock, and grain to the blessing of my seniors; without their blessing there is only illness, death, and decay.
Similar visions of hierarchy as the precondition of human flourishing have often been documented (e.g., Donham 1999; Hickel 2015). What has not yet been duly noted is the frequent imbrication of these visions of hierarchy with conceptions of grace. This blind spot is unsurprising since the grace in hierarchy is easily overlooked. For one thing, there may not be a term for ‘grace’ in the local language, and discovering grace as a relevant category of analysis may require articulating implicit assumptions. More importantly, the ‘anthropological fixation with reciprocity’ (Venkatesan 2011) can lead analysts to (mis)construe exchanges between seniors and juniors in terms of Maussian gift exchange; in hierarchically organised communities, juniors commonly provide to seniors various services and signs of respect, and these may be interpreted as gifts given to obtain blessings or other benefits. While this may be how things are locally understood, it is not the only possible understanding and perhaps not the most common one. In the Aari case at least, the traditional understanding of hierarchical exchange is best described in terms of grace. While there is no term for ‘grace’ in the Aari language, three local ideas convey that seniors’ blessings are received by grace, not by merit.
Aari suggest that if seniors give blessings, they do so out of ‘love’ (solma), not because they are required to do so. The idea becomes palpable in the deep affection seniors express when offering blessings, as when a man lovingly clasps and strokes the head of his nephew while spraying him with life-giving saliva. To the idea of seniors blessing out of ‘love’ corresponds the idea that juniors cannot indebt seniors, hence cannot compel them to dispense blessings. This is partly because the good things given by seniors are incommensurably greater than anything juniors could return: you cannot return the gift of life. More fundamentally, it is because the things juniors can return are not really owned by juniors at all. Aari understand that to bring something into being makes one the owner of that thing, and that seniors are therefore the true owners of everything juniors possess. So when you give something to seniors, you are really just giving them a fraction of what is already theirs. It's not a matter of transacting your property or labour power in return for a blessing; it's a matter of acknowledging a blessing received.
The third indication that Aari understand the exchange between seniors and juniors as an exchange of grace is that all services and signs of respect provided to seniors are described under the heading of ‘honour’ (bonshmi). Whether my younger brother attends to my horse or a child washes my feet, whether I send some meat to my mother or refrain from disobeying my uncle—it's all a matter of honour, of being honoured by those below and honouring those above. The language of honour conveys that the things given by juniors—however substantive in appearance—really are just symbols of gratitude. One acknowledges having received an irreciprocable gift by exalting the giver.
Taken together, these points suggest that Aari's understanding of hierarchical relations is best expressed in terms of grace: seniors are founts of grace on whose blessing juniors fundamentally depend. As I go on to show, it is this conception of grace which is responsible for what Aari perceive as the goods and the ills of hierarchy. I begin with the ills, talking about the problem of gomma which Aari cite as the main reason for converting to Christianity. The problem, in brief, is this: as founts of grace, seniors assume being entitled to juniors’ infinite honour and gratitude, but the honour and gratitude juniors are able and willing to give is finite. The mismatch between seniors’ expectations and juniors’ capacity to meet these expectations leads to disharmony among kin, a condition Aari experience as inherently bad and harmful.
The Ills of Hierarchy
As a way into this discussion, consider the following case, reported to me by its main protagonists, Lumma and her husband Gugo.
Lumma had been married to Gugo for a couple of years. Through hard work she had raised the money for buying a cow, and her husband Gugo had allowed her to graze it on his pasture. The cow had calved, the calf had grown into a cow, and now the two cows, mother and daughter, had calved in the same week. This was a great joy: there would be enough milk for making the butter Lumma needed for a bondfriendship exchange. But first she wanted to give thanks and so she asked her husband to collect the milk and to present to the lineage head two large calabashes of milk.
The lineage head, a senior brother of Gugo, agreed to carry out a thanksgiving ritual. But then he repeatedly postponed the ritual, and it was only after Gugo had ‘begged’ (miks) him for two weeks that the ritual was finally carried out. Lumma was getting anxious by this time to begin making butter, but Gugo told her to wait a little longer. He would collect the milk once more, he told her, to invite a few elders for an additional thanksgiving ritual. Lumma agreed but asked Gugo to give only one calabash to the elders, so that she could use the other to begin making butter right after they had left.
A week or so later, returning from the fields in the afternoon, Lumma heard voices from Gugo's hut. Entering to greet, she saw that Gugo was entertaining the elders with two calabashes of milk, not one. ‘That's when I went crazy’, Lumma told me, recounting the incident years later. ‘I grabbed one of the calabashes and ran outside. I ran to hide in the [nearby] grove. I was sure Gugo would chase me’. But Gugo never came. A few months later, however, Lumma's first cow died, and then the second, and then three calves. ‘If they hadn't died’, Lumma mused, ‘all the cattle around here would be mine today [I would have a great many]’. And worse was yet to come. While Lumma tried apologising, Gugo pretended nothing had happened. ‘He was holding on to his sadness’, Lumma recalled, ‘he just wouldn't forgive me’. And so gomma struck again, and even more violently—killing Mutsi, Lumma's and Gugo's teenage daughter. There was no doubt about the cause of her death, and haruspication confirmed: ‘It was Gugo's gomma that killed her.’
Gomma is what Pitt-Rivers (1992: 218) would call an ‘expression of negative grace’: a destructive force that arises when grace goes unreturned. The source of gomma is ‘sadness’ (ateri): when someone is under the impression of having been ‘slighted’ (toks), they become sad, their sadness produces stomach heat, the heat produces gomma, and gomma sooner or later harms someone further down the kinship hierarchy. This may be the one who caused sadness, as when Lumma loses her cows after offending her husband. Or it may be an innocent third party, as when Mutsi dies because of the conflict between her parents. In either case, the harm done by gomma really affects everyone. Gugo is obviously no less affected by the death of his daughter than Lumma. He is also affected by the death of Lumma's cows since he can no longer use their milk for his own purposes.
That gomma harms everyone is a point Aari explicitly make; as one woman observed, ‘doing gomma is like cutting your own finger’. The point also transpires in many traditional rituals and everyday practices aimed at preventing gomma. Lineage rituals, for example, are all about pushing kin to ‘confess’ (buds) harboured sadness and to remove sadness through conflict resolution and feasting. Similarly, one household head explained that, when upset with his dependents, he would go to a nearby stream to rub his stomach with cold water. This was to ‘cool it down, so that my sadness may not get them’.
Gomma, then, harms everyone and is feared by everyone. On the face of it, this is because gomma is the (intermediate) cause of all suffering. Traditionalist Aari were adamant that nothing could harm you unless there was gomma; without gomma snakes don't bite, lightening doesn't strike, and sorcery doesn't kill. But the real problem with gomma lies elsewhere: in the sadness which is its cause. The view that all harm in this world is ultimately caused by sadness must be read as a statement about the inherent badness of sadness. Sadness isn't seen as bad because it has bad consequences; it is alleged to have bad consequences because it is perceived as bad. When sadness undermines harmony among kin, life becomes unbearable.
Dynamics of Negative Grace
Efforts to prevent sadness notwithstanding, both Christian and traditionalist Aari suggest that the traditional way of life is marked by the frequent occurrence of gomma. What is it about this way of life that leads to the loss of good grace among kin? Consider again the case of Lumma and Gugo.
The trouble started when the lineage head repeatedly postponed the thanksgiving ritual. Without the ritual, no one may drink milk, and the lineage head exploited this to get Gugo to honour him by way of ‘begging’. This is a common strategy: seniors often make demands for honour by withholding what juniors urgently need. They do so in the understanding that without their blessing, juniors would not have had any milk (or whatever) in the first place, and that it's therefore just and right for juniors to acknowledge their dependence through begging and other signs of respect.
The lineage head's postponing-strategy was a first test of Lumma's patience. A second test came when Gugo asked her to wait with using her milk. As Gugo explained, his own aim in inviting the elders had been to ‘grow’ his ‘name’. ‘Name’ or public honour is gained through generosity, so offering a generous milk feast to the elders promised to increase Gugo's standing in the community. This was best achieved by giving two calabashes, not one. But Gugo was also concerned to get respect from his wife. He stressed that it had been exceedingly generous of him to allow Lumma to make money for buying a cow: having paid bridewealth, he was the owner of her labour power, yet he had graciously given her time to distil and sell arake (local liquor). He had also been generous when allowing her to graze her cows on his pasture. ‘There was not a thing in her hands when she came from her relatives [married me]’, Gugo summarised. ‘What she got, she got in my house’. So was it asking too much that Lumma share some of her milk? Was he, Gugo, not the real owner of her cow? Could he not have sold it, had he wanted to?
Lumma was not in principle opposed to the demands made on her. Like everyone else, she assumed that good things are obtained by the grace of seniors, and she wished to give thanks for her milk by making an offering to the lineage head. Nor was she opposed to her husband's suggestion to invite the elders, though she sought to impose a limit. It was only when the limit was transgressed that Lumma rebelled. Sparked perhaps by an acute sense of unfairness, her reaction must, above all, be seen in light of her own quest for public honour. Like her husband, Lumma hoped to make a name for herself, a project she pursued by acquiring bondfriends. But her ambitions were cut short when her husband used up the milk she needed for completing another bondfriendship exchange, and this was when her patience snapped.
Gugo was deeply offended. Seeing Lumma as ingrate and himself slighted, Gugo became sad. Rectifying things would have required admitting to his sadness and opening up the road to reconciliation. But this clashed with his aspiration to honour. Admitting to his sadness would have meant demeaning himself by revealing how much he cared about the respect shown to him by his wife. And opening up the road to reconciliation would have meant abandoning the moral high ground on which he had been put through Lumma's offence. So the logic of honour suggested ‘holding on’ to his sadness. But this was bad and dangerous, as Gugo had to learn through the death of his daughter.
The case of Lumma and Gugo is typical. Many of the gomma cases I studied exhibited a similar dynamic: First, seniors had made heavy demands on juniors’ time, wealth, and patience, and juniors had honoured these demands for a while. Then a tipping point was reached, and juniors had started showing more or less subtle signs of rebellion. This in turn had caused sadness to seniors, sometimes provoking them to make even heavier demands. Thus, harmony among kin was lost and relations remained disturbed until illness or misfortune had compelled people to make an effort at reconciliation.
Underneath this dynamic, we recognise the logic of grace. The reason seniors make demands is that, as givers of blessings, they assume being entitled to honour. They also pursue honour in the public realm, and for this they need juniors’ wealth and services. Far from contending themselves with mere ‘symbols’ of gratitude, seniors make substantive demands. These demands sometimes exceed what juniors are able or willing to give. Where juniors rebel, seniors feel that their generosity is answered with ingratitude. This causes sadness and the breakdown of good relations among kin.
Leaving Hierarchy: From the Grace of Seniors to the Grace of God
Since the 1990s, around two thirds of Aari have converted to Evangelical Christianity. Christianity was first introduced by the Sudan Interior Mission in the 1960s. For a variety of reasons, including the anti-Protestant policies of the socialist Derg regime (1974–1991), conversion was slow at first. With the 1991 lifting of restrictions on religious freedom, however, increasing numbers of Aari found their way into the church. By this time, the church was firmly in local hand as the missionaries had left in 1974.
The appeal of conversion was the view that Christianity offered a solution to the problem of gomma. ‘There is very little sadness among Christians’, Aari claimed, and this for them explained why as a Christian you were much less at risk of being harmed by gomma than as a follower of traditional religion. Meanwhile, and the continuing attractiveness of Christianity notwithstanding, Aari converts have also discovered downsides about their new religion. They lament that the Christian way of life is much less sociable than the indigenous one, a point they make by claiming that there is less ‘love’ among Christians. What changes explain this ambivalence?
The most conspicuous and consequential change concerns ideas about grace. Aari Christians reject the traditional view and assert that God alone is the source of all blessing; it's only by His grace that we come by the good things in life. The source of life has thus been unified and moved beyond the human realm: rather than working to stay in favour with a plurality of seniors, one looks towards a single supreme being. This change is consequential because it flattens social hierarchy: where no one has any special power to bless, people appear as essentially ‘equal’ (yekka). This, in turn undermines the traditional ideology of honour. As seniors are no longer founts of grace, they have no reason to expect being honoured and served. This doesn't give juniors licence to be disrespectful; ‘honour thy father and thy mother’ is a command Aari Christians take seriously. Indeed, honour should be shown to everyone regardless of rank, for God dwells in everyone, and so one honours God by honouring others. What changes is that no one should expect and demand being honoured. One may gratefully accept whatever tokens of respect others are ready to give, but one may never push them.
The new vision of grace and humility has had a profound impact on social relations. It has had this impact partly through individual efforts: dedicated Christians work hard to cultivate themselves as humble subjects and to express humility in their everyday interactions. This reduces conflict, especially among household members, because it includes refraining from making excessive demands on juniors. Even more consequential than these individual efforts is the way in which participating in Christian institutions steers people towards humility. Aari Christians have elaborated their own ways of doing things like funerals, naming ceremonies, or conflict resolution, and these Christian institutions differ starkly from their traditional counterparts. They all give expression to the idea that people ought not to demand honour for themselves, since everyone is under God, the sole source of life. The effects this has on sociality can be illustrated by comparing traditional and Christian ways of transferring bridewealth.
No Risk, No Love: Losing the Goods of Hierarchy
In early February 2017, I attended a traditional bridewealth ceremony. This was for a woman from my host lineage who had married several years ago. A group of ten of us went to the compound of the groom where we were received with much decorum. After being shown into a hut nicely patched with grass and cow hides, several representatives of the groom came to meet us. ‘Here are 100 Birr [$4]’, one of them said, placing a crumbled note in a wooden bowl before us, ‘that's all we could find’. What followed were two days of intense interaction around the slowly filling bowl. At each step the representatives would bring a little more money, apologising profusely for the groom's (purported) poverty and unworthiness. To this we would respond with insults and threats to leave the scene unless more money was brought. The representatives would then humble themselves before us, prostrating themselves on the ground, kissing our knees, begging us to call it enough—and promising to bring more. All this was visibly enjoyed by everyone, though one senior man from our group worked himself into such a rage that he left the scene prematurely (an incident the others deplored). Towards the end of the second day, over 5000 Birr and several heads of cattle had been paid, and we finally called it quits. There followed an affectionate greeting with the groom and his group, and a lengthy, boisterous feast.
Only a few days later I attended a Christian bridewealth ceremony. The contrast was stark, the main feature of the event being its brevity and calmness. At nightfall, close relatives of the bride's father assembled at his house, waiting quietly for the groom's representatives to appear. These appeared in due time, led by two church leaders. Without further ado, one of the leaders offered a brief prayer in which he reminded people that all things, including daughters, come from God. The second leader then handed over a thickish bundle of banknotes wrapped in paper. This was humbly accepted by the bride's father, without counting or further comment. There followed a frugal meal, taken mostly in silence. The event concluded with prayer.
The proceedings in the first case are guided by ideas familiar from the previous section. The wife-givers present themselves as owners of the bride and expect being treated with honour. The wife-takers acknowledge this claim and humble themselves: by deliberately giving only small amounts of money, they put themselves in a position that allows for exuberant displays of respect and deference. Stressing their own poverty and unworthiness, they help wife-givers to emerge as infinitely superior and generous.
What stands out is the event's social intensity: over the course of two days, many people are brought into close interaction. Roles are clearly distributed, one side acting as hawks, the other as doves. The playful antagonism creates an atmosphere thick with excitement. Once the payment has been completed, the atmosphere changes. The wife-givers now stop being haughty and warmly reach out to the groom and his people; as the latter bow to greet, they are taken by the chin and given a hearty kiss on the mouth. If the earlier parts of the ritual emphasised hierarchical difference, the atmosphere now turns into one of unity and affection.
It is precisely this sort of atmosphere Aari have in mind when speaking of ‘love’ (solma). Though solma can also designate a subjective feeling (like the one seniors are said to have when dispensing blessings), its principal use is for describing a certain state or quality of social relations, marked by a sense of affectionate connection across difference. This quality emerges towards the end of many traditional rituals. As in the case of bridewealth, the first, longer part of these rituals sees a senior side making demands and a junior side responding to these demands with shows of honour. Once the demands have been satisfied, the tone of the interaction becomes warm and convivial; love comes to the fore. Importantly, the latter state could not be attained without the former. There cannot be a sense of affectionate connection across difference without first having stressed difference; tensions cannot be resolved without first having created them. Aari love thus appears as a good ‘internal’ (MacIntyre 1981: 219) to hierarchical relations. It is only through the successful practice of hierarchical relations that love is realised.
The emphasis is on successful. As we saw in the previous section, the demands made by seniors sometimes exceed what juniors are able to give. This means that people are treading a thin line. There is an ever-present risk that interactions with the potential to create love end up creating sadness. The risk may be especially great in everyday contexts, where the checks and balances of ritual are missing. But even in ritual contexts, things sometimes get out of hands. In my example, one man gets carried away by his performance of anger and offends everyone by leaving the scene. Similarly, people reported several deaths that had occurred when mock spear fights performed at traditional funerals turned serious.
The risk associated with hierarchical interaction is foreclosed by the Christian emphasis on humility. In the bridewealth case, those on the senior side are not given a chance to make demands: the money is given as a lump sum, so wife-givers cannot act up. They are also reminded that all things come from God, and that God therefore is the only one with a justified expectation of being honoured. Meanwhile, those on the junior side cannot get upset either, since no demands are made on them. All this creates an atmosphere free of tension and antagonism. But it also means a lack of excitement and social intensity. The tone of the interaction remains polite and subdued from beginning to end. No tensions are built up that could be dissolved into unity and affection. There is no risk but also no love.
Similar changes are apparent in all Christian institutions. From naming ceremonies to funerals, from conflict resolution to healing rituals, the stress is on avoiding any appearance of hierarchy. Neither is anyone given occasion to elevate themselves by placing demands on others, nor does anyone practice submission. As collective humility replaces the play of seeking and giving honour, interactions become shorter and less intense. Instead of engaging one another in face-to-face interaction, people spend time facing God in religious ritual; praying and preaching replace demanding and giving. All this makes the Christian way of life manifestly more peaceful and continues to attract new converts. But it also makes this way of life less sociable. As traditional hierarchy gives way to Christian equality, the goods of hierarchy are lost alongside its ills.
Sustaining God's Favour: Sacrificing Conviviality to Prevent Negative Grace
I have shown that Christianity has affected Aari sociality by relocating the source of grace: seeing God as the sole source of life, Aari Christians have gotten rid of all practices that could indicate otherwise. Christianity also offers a new conception of the prerequisites of grace. As I briefly show in closing, this too affects sociality.
Aari Christians agree with traditionalists that all good things in life are received by grace, not by merit or chance. They also agree that failure to acknowledge grace leads to harm; just as seniors’ sadness over juniors’ ingratitude brings forth gomma, so God's sadness over human ingratitude brings forth ‘divine wrath’ (sabite gami). Where Christians differ is in their view on what it takes to acknowledge grace, hence, to sustain God's favour.
One way of articulating the difference is by saying that God is truly needless and that the only demand he makes on people is to keep the law he has put in place for the good of humanity. Seniors by contrast are not at all needless and therefore make all sorts of substantive demands. Sustaining seniors’ favour requires obeying whatever demands they happen to be making, whereas sustaining God's favour requires obeying a firmly established, unchanging law.1
Crucially, the demands seniors make often lead to social interaction, whereas God's law often leads away from it. Seniors ask you to help them plough their field, to bring milk for a thanksgiving ritual, or to show honour before marrying, and all of this brings people together and allows them to be sociable. God's law, by contrast, is understood by Aari to be mainly about avoiding ‘bad works’ (darilsi woni), that is, sins of commission like adultery, fighting, or drinking alcohol. From this follows a powerful drive to avoid all practices and situations with the slightest potential for sin—even if doing so means losing good things, too. The disappearance of commensality from church life illustrates this.
Eating together has long been at the heart of Aari sociality, and Christians agree that it's a fine thing to gather for a shared meal. Yet, they also observe that commensality can lead to sin, and that it's therefore better not to spend too much time eating together. Baddi, a forty-year old Christian, voiced a common line of thought when he explained that ‘feasting can put people into the mood for alcohol; then they get drunk and start quarrelling, and in the end someone gets killed’. He also offered the example of how the church had stopped celebrating Christmas with a shared meal.
It used to be the case, Baddi told me, that Christians slaughtered an ox at Christmas, with everyone chipping in as much money as they could afford. But then some people found this unfair and asked that everyone pay a similar amount. Before long, however, new complaints arose: while every family paid the same amount, some families consumed a bigger share of the meat because they had more children. Noting the jealousy this caused, the issue was discussed, and church members decided to henceforth eat only roasted grain at Christmas. As Baddi recalls, the tenor of the discussion was that ‘it's this meat that is turning into an obstacle for us.…Let the meat go’. But the grain eating did not go well, either, since some people complained over having brought (expensive) barley while others had only brought maize. And so it was decided to not have a shared meal at Christmas at all. This was widely lamented as a sign of declining love but was seen as necessary for preventing sin.
The disappearance of Christmas commensality is only one example of how efforts to sustain God's grace have shaped the relational life of Aari Christians: concerned not to lose God's favour by violating his law and committed to living in a way that acknowledges Him as the source of all good things, they have sacrificed various occasions for conviviality. This clearly contributes to making the Christian way of life comparatively more peaceful and harmonious; you can't offend each other if you're not interacting. But as Christians increasingly come to observe, good relations through no relations are not really good relations at all. There is no sadness, they say, but also no love. This makes some look with nostalgia towards the hierarchical way of life they have abandoned.
The Ambivalence of Grace and Hierarchy
I began this article with the question why people's experience of hierarchy is often marked by ambivalence. The answer I came to via the Aari case turns on recognising the grace at the heart of hierarchy.
Being part of a hierarchy means being part of a social system in which you stand chances of receiving by grace what you could not attain by your own efforts. Those above you control resources which can only be accessed through them and which they are at liberty to dispense. The emperor may grant pardon, the priest remission of sins, and the Max Plank director bountiful funds for research (Peacock 2016: 111). The downside is a lack of security: your efforts at sustaining favour may not be rewarded. It's true that superiors are seldom totally independent; ideology may suggest otherwise, but inferiors usually have something superiors depend on, hence something to bargain with. But dependence is always greater on the lower end of a hierarchy, and so it remains a matter of goodwill whether superiors dispense what inferiors desire. You can work hard to win favour, but enjoying favour is not a sufficient condition for receiving grace.
Where grace is given and returned, however, hierarchy affords goods greater than those that accrue to individuals. Being part of a hierarchy may enable people to obtain for themselves care, protection, service, or honour. But it also enables them to enjoy relational goods realised in the course of interaction; when unequals show each other signs of beneficence and gratitude, there emerges among them a particular quality of connectedness and affection which is unique to hierarchical settings. It's not easy to describe this quality since, as MacIntyre (1981: 220) notes, the goods internal to a practice can only be fully grasped through personal participation. But that doesn't mean that anthropologists having lived in hierarchically organised communities should not try to articulate the goods internal to hierarchy and the gracious exchange which is at its heart.
Drawing attention to the goods of hierarchy and grace is necessary to counterbalance a long-standing focus on their ills. This focus, no doubt, emerged in response to real problems. The historian of ideas Malcolm Bull (2019: 12–17), for instance, reminds us of the reasons for the disappearance of mercy from political and economic life. In late medieval and early modern Europe, the ‘royal prerogative of clemency was exercised repeatedly in a variety of contexts to demonstrate that the monarch was merciful and thus merited their power’ (2019: 12). In the words of a text published on occasion of Charles II's coronation pardon of 1661 (quoted in Bull 2019: 13), the king was ‘well pleased with opportunities to abound in acts of Grace and Clemency to His people, from whom He doth also expect Returns of Loyalty and due obedience on their parts’. It was this imbrication of mercy with power and hierarchy that led Enlightenment thinkers to regard as a vice what for centuries had been seen as a virtue. Yet, justified critiques of mercy as partial and arbitrary notwithstanding, discarding mercy has also had obvious downsides. As Bull (2019: 17) notes, mercy was ‘excluded as a possible remedy for the workings of capitalism’, and ‘the exclusion of mercy from law and politics was closely linked to the rationalization of political life as a system for maximizing self-interest’.
The general point here is that dispensing with grace is as double-edged as grace itself; Aari found that moving from one conception of grace to another involved both gains and losses, and this also applies for moving beyond grace altogether. There is something liberating about living at one's own pleasure, free of a sense of depending on the goodwill of human or divine others. But it also means losing a sense of gratitude, and a readiness to make others recipients of unmerited gifts.
Acknowledgements
I am thankful to Méadhbh Mclvor and Michael Edwards for the invitation to think about grace. Helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article were provided by Nicholas Lackenby, Laurie Denyer Willis, Justine Owino, and fellow contributors to the volume. I also thank the CJA's three anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments.
Note
Grace and law are often opposed to each other (cf. Introduction to this Special Issue; see also McDougall 2009). The Aari case complicates and reaffirms the grace/law dyad: it complicates it by bringing to attention that obedience to God's law may be seen as a necessary condition for receiving grace; it reaffirms it because Aari see law-abidingness only as a necessary, not as a sufficient condition for receiving grace. God's grace remains an ‘extra’, over and above what is obligatory (Pitt-Rivers 1992: 217).
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