The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Property was sacred, and not only in the legal sense that poachers could be shot. It also had a spiritual value. Yurok men would often spend long hours meditating on money, while the highest objects of wealth – precious hides and obsidian blades displayed only at festivals – were the ultimate sacra. Yurok struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense as well: as Goldschmidt reports, ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence – eating, sexual gratification, play or sloth’. Big eaters were considered ‘vulgar’. Young men and women were lectured on the need to eat slowly and modestly, to keep their bodies slim and lithe. Wealthy Yurok men would gather every day in sweat lodges, where an almost daily test of these ascetic values was the need to crawl headfirst through a tiny aperture that no overweight body could possibly enter. Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles. Even those who did inherit wealth continued to emphasize their personal hard work, frugality and achievement; and while the rich were expected to be generous towards the less fortunate and look after their own lands and possessions, responsibilities for sharing and caring were modest in comparison with foraging societies almost anywhere else.