Core Concepts in Cultural Anthropology by Robert H. Lavenda; Emily A. Schultz

Author:Robert H. Lavenda; Emily A. Schultz
Language: eng
Format: epub

8.4 FORMS OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

The contrast between feuding and warfare draws our attention back to an issue that has preoccupied many political anthropologists: societies that engage in warfare typically have some form of centralized political organization, whereas societies that engage in feuding typically do not. Prehistorians and political anthropologists have compared the different political systems known from archaeology, history, and ethnography. Like the nineteenth-century evolutionists, they recognize four broad types of political systems that appear to have developed over the 200,000 or so years our species has existed and that correlate broadly with other cultural attributes such as subsistence strategies and types of kinship organization (for discussion of subsistence strategies, see chapter 9; for kinship organization, see chapter 7). In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists like Elman Service and Morton Fried offered new interpretations of cultural evolution that incorporated critiques of nineteenth-century schemes. Their work has influenced most subsequent anthropological discussions of comparative political systems.

The earliest political forms appear to have been egalitarian: that is, all (adult) members of the society had roughly equal access to valued resources, both material and social. The oldest human societies we know about archaeologically, which depended on foraging and on egalitarian forms of political organization, have been called bands. Foraging societies are small in scale; historically and prehistorically, they were few in number and widely scattered across the land. Bands of foragers typically number no more than fifty individuals coresident at the same time. Tasks are assigned on the basis of gender and age, but the division is not rigid. Kinship systems are generally bilateral (defined in chapter 7), and bands create alliances with one another through marriage. Relations of economic exchange are organized on the basis of reciprocity.

The domestication of plants and animals marked a major shift in the subsistence strategy, supporting somewhat larger egalitarian social groups that anthropologists call tribes. The major social change associated with those who took up horticulture (extensive agriculture) or those who began to herd animals is seen in the appearance of unilineal kinship groups (defined in chapter 7) that became the joint owners of property in the form of farmland or herds. New cultural forms such as age grades (defined in chapter 5) may create social links that crosscut kinship groups. Kin groups may compete with one another for resources, but they are not ranked hierarchically; indeed, within each kin group, the access of adults to communal resources remains broadly equal.

The erosion of egalitarian political forms is found in societies classified as chiefdoms. Chiefdoms make use of the same forms of subsistence and kinship as tribes, but distinctions among lineages emerge in terms of status or ranking. In particular, one lineage is elevated above the rest, and its leader (the chief) becomes a key political figure whose higher status often derives from his role in redistributive economic exchanges (defined in chapter 9). The chief’s higher rank (and that of the lineage to which he belongs) gives him an increased opportunity to favor his kin and his supporters with material or social benefits, but he has very limited coercive power.

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