Upriver People and Downriver People

 

Human beings evolved from other hominins and spread throughout the Earth.  For most of the time that they've been here, they've been nomadic.  But for most of that time, their ability to travel - and thus their strategy - has been profoundly limited by one crucial necessity: the need for fresh, salt-free water to survive.  Moreover, they'll avoid stagnant water, which is more likely to cause disease.  Thus, for untold millennia before the development of plumbing, they had to stay within fairly quick walking distance of rivers - typically, the small tributaries that lead into larger rivers, which will often be the freshest and most potable.

Thus, in almost every part of the globe, long before the development of agriculture and the concept of land as property, humans both competed and cooperated for the purpose of safe access to rivers.  Rivers provide not only drinking water but also food sources such as fish, opportunities for bathing and the disposal of waste, and eventually means of navigation.  Towards this end, humans not only had to contend with each other, but also with all of the other animals that likewise require fresh water - bears, big cats, mammoths, and many more - not to mention the animals that live in the rivers, such as hippopotami.  

As nomadic people began to make permanent (or semi-permanent) settlements, where on the river they settled would have significant consequences, and as people moved up and down the rivers the constantly shifting relations between them would have repercussions on many levels of culture and politics.  Although family is the first form of hierarchy, you might say that the relations between upriver people and downriver people is the first class conflict.

But this conflict is complex and it's not always entirely easy to which class was on top.  The upriver people and downriver people may have had various kinds of antagonisms between them - at times, they may have hated each other - yet they also needed each other.  One might say that the relationship between them is dialectical. 

Downriver people tend to see themselves as gentle, peaceful, civilized, well-mannered farmers and herders, who occasionally engage in free trade, (later, basketweavers, carpenters, weavers, sewers, potters, sculptors, coppersmiths, blacksmiths, and other kinds of craftsmen and tradesmen) in a little market, grateful for what nature provides them, humble, quiet, well-meaning, introverted, sophisticated and intelligent - and they tend to see upriver people as wild, violent barbarians, unintelligent and unsophisticated, who periodically descend upon them, raid, pillage, enslave, and destroy, without any concept or understanding of the value of that to which they lay siege, steal, and burn.  Upriver people, meanwhile, tend to see downriver people as weak, soft, (often effeminate) decadent, simpering cowards, who fail to stand up for any moral values and thus sink into the mire of cultural relativism - and who have thus lost the right to the massive wealth that they jealously hoard.  Upriver people tend to see themselves as ethnically and culturally pure, uncontaminated, upright, virtuous, strong, (often masculine) courageous, and free.  

Both sides of this conflict generally understand this conflict through the filter of religion.  Upriver people, in particular, see downriver people as having lost the mandate and approval of the divine - thus no longer having the right to that which they have.  They propagate a kind of religious fervor that places themselves, the mountain people, as being closer to direct contact with the God(s).  Downriver people tend to understand this conflict in religious terms as well, but their interpretations of religion is often wordier and more complex, and they can often come up with extremely clever rationalizations that point out the hypocrisy of the upriver people, tripping them up in their own language and turning their own words against them.  Thus, as always, they prove their own sophistication and supremacy.

Interestingly, both sides agree on some crucial intuitions.  They both see the downriver community as having become decayed, deteriorated, contaminated, watered down, having lost an imagined earlier greatness and potency.  But the downriver people see the immigrating and invading upriver people as being the agents and causes of this decadence and degeneracy.  Thus there is a kind of ratcheting effect.  It's not too hard to imagine that as upriver immigrants trickle down to the downriver community, to try to make better lives for themselves, they will come to see themselves as good, fine virtuous people and try to guard the growing city against the invasion of other, (further) upriver people.