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| Not all of a family's agricultural surplus was available for daily subsistence, insurance against hardship, or trade and the accumulation of non-perishable wealth. Some of their resources were needed to meet various social obligations. Rites of passage such as reaching adulthood, sexual maturity, marriage, and death ceremonies; alliances between villages; payment of debts to end blood feuds; changes in the seasons, and celebrations of harvest, all require resources to express and ritualize a people's beliefs and emotions. In ceremonial transactions between households, marriages for example, some wealth moves from one family to another. At other rituals, such as those to mark the harvesting of crops, social or religious leaders may have benefited from the movement of food and other resources from the household to the group. That is, social and religious leaders often serve as the conduit through which a group's responsibilities to the gods, spirits, and each other are funneled. |