Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [145]
Five adjectives, mutually somewhat contradictory, characterize Greenland Norse society: communal, violent, hierarchical, conservative, and Eurocentric. All of those features were carried over from the ancestral Icelandic and Norwegian societies, but became expressed to an extreme degree in Greenland.
To begin with, Greenland’s Norse population of about 5,000 lived on 250 farms, with an average of 20 people per farm, organized in turn into communities centered on 14 main churches, with an average of about 20 farms per church. Norse Greenland was a strongly communal society, in which one person could not go off, make a living by himself or herself, and hope to survive. On the one hand, cooperation among people of the same farm or community was essential for the spring seal hunt, summer Nordrseta hunt (described below), late-summer hay harvest, and autumn caribou hunt and for building, each of which activities required many people working together and would have been inefficient or impossible for a single person alone. (Imagine trying to round up a herd of wild caribou or seals, or lifting a 4-ton stone of a cathedral into place, by yourself.) On the other hand, cooperation was also necessary for economic integration between farms and especially between communities, because different Greenland locations produced different things, such that people at different locations depended on each other for the things that they did not produce. I already mentioned the transfers of seals hunted at the outer fjords to the inner fjords, of caribou meat hunted at upland sites to lowland sites, and of livestock from rich to poor farms when the latter lost their animals in a harsh winter. The 160 cattle for which the Gardar barns contained stalls far exceeded any conceivable local needs at Gardar. As we shall see below, walrus tusks, Greenland’s most valuable export, were acquired by a few Western Settlement hunters in the Nordrseta hunting grounds but were then distributed widely among Western and Eastern Settlement farms for the laborious task of processing before export.
Belonging to a farm was essential both to survival and to social identity. Every piece of the few useful patches of land in the Western and Eastern Settlements was owned either by some individual farm or else communally by a group of farms, which thereby held the rights to all of that land’s resources, including not only its pastures and hay but also its caribou, turf, berries, and even its driftwood. Hence a Greenlander wanting to go it alone couldn’t just go off hunting and foraging for himself. In Iceland, if you lost your farm or got ostracized, you could try living somewhere else—on an island, an abandoned farm, or the interior highlands. You didn’t have that option in Greenland, where there wasn’t any “somewhere else” to which to go.
The result was a tightly controlled society, in which the few chiefs of the richest farms could prevent anyone else from doing something that seemed to threaten their interests—including anyone experimenting with innovations that did not promise to help the chiefs. At the top, Western Settlement was controlled by Sandnes, its richest farm and its sole one with access to the outer fjords, while Eastern Settlement was controlled by Gardar, its richest farm and the seat of its bishop. We shall see that this consideration may help us understand the eventual fate of Greenland Norse society.
Also carried to Greenland from Iceland and Norway along with this communality was a strong violent streak. Some of our evidence is written: when Norway’s King Sigurd Jorsalfar proposed in 1124 to