Political

and
Leadership
Structures
Political Organization
Bands
Tribes
Chiefdoms
States and Nations
Political Organization
 Refers
to the way power is distributed and
embedded in societies
 Who has power
 How does power differ from authority
 How is power organized and administered
 How is order maintained
 How is conflict organized
 Political organization and
maintenance of order
Social control needed for people
to live together
Ostracism – banning a person from
a group
Judiciary systems
 Band
 Small group political independent, though
related, households
 All social relationships based on kinship
 Least complex form of political organization
 Associated with foraging forms of subsistence
 Decisions made through consensus
 No fixed leadership, only informal recognition of
prowess
 Tribe
 Tribal system consist of separate bands or villages
 Integrated through lineages, clan, age grades or
other associations cross-cutting kinship and
authority
 Associated with farming or herding subsistence
strategies
 Greater population density
 Tribe
No centralized leadership
Typically someone respected for
wisdom or prowess – charisma and
“big men”
Group decisions by consensus
 Tribe
 Leaders of localized descent groups or a
territorial group
 Authority is personal
 Not elected, no formal office
 Status result of personal behavior
 Status often achieved through exchange
 Gift exchange
 Redistribution – public exchange of scarce resources
 Chiefdoms
Aregional society in which one or
more local groups are organized
under a single ruling individual –
the chief – who is at the head of a
ranked hierarchy of people
 The Chief
Divine king – macrocosm and microcosm
Status determined by closeness to chief
Office of chief often hereditary
 Passing to son or to sister’s son
• Also based on talents
• Often conceived as a semi-sacred position
May accumulated personal wealth to add
to power
 Chiefdom
 A true authority figure with a formal office
 Can distribute resources
 Associated with redistributive economies
 Chief controls surpluses and labor
 May collect taxes or tribute
 May recruit labor for community projects
 Irrigation, temple a palace
 Can conscript for military
 Recognized hierarchy linked to chief
 Tend to be unstable
 May form confederacies
 Chiefdom
 Do not have unequal access to economic
resources or to power, but they do contain
social groups having unequal access to
prestige
 Unequal access to prestige often reflected
in position of chief to which only some
members of a specified group in the society
can succeed
 Band and Tribe vs. Chiefdom
 In band and tribal societies competitive
display and conspicuous consumption by
individuals disappears and anyone
foolish enough to boast how great he is
gets accused of witchcraft and is stoned
to death
 Mutual benefit predominates, not
redistribution
 The State
 The most formal of political
organizations and is one of the
hallmarks of civilizations
 Political power is centralized in a
government which may LEGITIMATELY
use force to regulate the affairs of its
citizens
The state: associated with --
 Increased food production (agriculture
and industry)
 Irrigation and transformation of landscape
 Increased population
 Fixed territory
 Developed market system
 Appearance of cities developed urban
sector
The state: associated with --

 Appearance of bureaucracy
 Military
 Usually an official religion
 Delegates of authority and maintains order
 Within and without its borders
 Right to control information
 Authority is formal and impersonal
 Holding office and the person
The state: associated with --

Differentiation in population
appears – social stratification
Appearance of ethnicity
Permanent, heritable
inequality
 Slaves, castes and classes
Social conflict increases
Original states appeared 5000
years ago

Primary states are agricultural

Theories about their formation
Military needs, irrigation needs,
environmental conditions
 Why the state? From band to state
 More wealth
 More people
 More settled
 More inequality and ranking
 Less reliance on kinship
 More internal and external conflict
 Increased power and responsibility to leaders
 Increased burden to citizens to support political
organizations
 Increased use of formal, legal structures for adjudication
 The Nation
 Modern nation-state a more recent phenomenon
 Communities of people who see themselves as
“one people” on the basis of common ancestry,
history, society, institutions, ideology, language,
territory and religion
 Anthropology questions this reality while
recognizing the power of idea
 Differences are suppressed in modern nation-
states
 Nation and Nationality

 Nation was once a term that referred to

tribe, indigenous people, or ethnic group
collectivity sharing single language,
religion, history, territory, ancestry, kinship
 Nation comes to mean the state = a country
A sociopolitical form, the modern state
composed of diverse ethnic groups
Nation as “Imagined Community”

Itis imagined because the

members of even the smallest
nation will never know most of
their fellow members, meet them,
or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of
their communion.
Imagined community
 A community that “imagines” itself
 No possibility of face-to-face communication
 Moments of simultaneity
 Language and “print capitalism”
 Monuments and memorials
 Anthropology questions this reality while
recognizing the power of the idea
 Differences are marked and suppressed in modern
nation-states
 Thank
you . . .