This is interesting. One question and one semi-question:
1. Do "Big Men" first come into any semblance of power through redistribution (I give my food to Tom down the street, now he is my first follower), or does it start some other way (My father is important, therefore I am somewhat important)?
2. I wonder if humans only punish generous behavior in their peers. I assume that leaders have a different standard, as we don't see them as "one of us", and thus we allow them to do things that we would otherwise look down upon.
2. In the corporate world at least, leaders are usually very encouraging of generosity or high-performance; it benefits their organization, after all. It's punished by peers because leaders encourage it. The peers are all in competition for a scarce resource - the leader's favor - and so when the leader bestows that on one individual for a particular accomplishment or act, that one individual ends up being resented by all their peers.
Think back to elementary school where the teacher's pet would get hammered down relentlessly by her schoolmates until she stopped speaking up in class. It's the same dynamic: overperformance leads to the lion's share of the teacher's attention, which makes your peers feel shortchanged, which results in social consequences for the overperformer.
This is also behind the conventional wisdom that "You can accomplish a lot in a big company if you don't care who gets the credit." If you overperform but then make everybody else look good, they won't resent you for it, and instead will help you out next time. That results in continued overperformance, as long as you can continue to stomach putting lots of effort in and lots of other folks getting the credit.
I don't believe anyone's been present to document the establishing of a "big man" system in these small tribes. But consider the influence of Richard Stallman. If he'd just been some guy writing his manifestos and such, I doubt he'd have much influence. Instead I think his influence came from the software he wrote, and the fact he gave it away for free.
My hunch is that the documented phenomena with punishing generous people is a "Sample population = The sort of person who attends a particular university in the United States" sort of issue.
Picking Stallman seems like a poor choice of example: he's been called a "smelly weirdo" by probably more people he can count, and I'm afraid that arguing it's all down to his politics would just be making excuses.
He instigated a few reasonably influential movements, I think influential people are maladjusted almost by definition. Whether or not he is universally adored is irrelevant to whether or not he has clout.
Yes, the feeling I got comparing the two articles is that "Big-Man" situations are subtly different from ostracizing of more generous people. For one thing, it sounds like "Big-Men" are more of mediators than actual donors.
I would say pretty much every exchange is essentially to do with your skill as a mediator, however according to the article there is definitely exchange of material goods.
1. Do "Big Men" first come into any semblance of power through redistribution (I give my food to Tom down the street, now he is my first follower), or does it start some other way (My father is important, therefore I am somewhat important)?
2. I wonder if humans only punish generous behavior in their peers. I assume that leaders have a different standard, as we don't see them as "one of us", and thus we allow them to do things that we would otherwise look down upon.