www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 11
Human Political Forms: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states
Government plays a large role in our society. To better understand this aspect of our society, we next look at its original forms. We humans have had to invent ways of organizing ourselves into structures larger than that of our innate band of twenty to two hundred or so persons. This size of political structure has increasingly grown from bands to the government of tribes, which are collections of bands that unite in response to something, to the government of chiefdoms, which have permanent leaders who collect and share goods and services from a central urban center, to states. It’s a safe bet that within a small number of decades, we will have some sort of global structure. The ten thousand human cultures have produced just as many political systems. No two of them have been identical, but some generalizations can be made. This chapter contains a description of four, common types of political organization, including bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. The populations of these four types roughly increases from hundreds, to thousands, and then tens of thousands of people.
This description of political forms is a summary of Morton H. Fried’s The Evolution of Political Society, Lawrence Krader’s The Formation of the State, and The Evolution of the Prehistoric State by Jonathan Haas. You might like to read their entire books to get a more thorough description of this topic.
For us humans, the band is the naturally occurring group. For the example of the Shoshone, visit http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/american_indians/shoshoniindians.html,for the Goshute, visit http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/american_indians/goshuteindians.html, and see others at http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/american_indians/nativeamericansinutah.html (Visit http://plpt.nsn.us for information about the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribes' Reservation today.) A band is an association of extended families, such as that of the Kalapalo, and contains about twenty to two hundred persons. The band is held together by strong family ties. The members of the band know the other individuals well enough to predict their behavior in most any situation. Band decisions are made through the consensus of family heads. The band moves around within a home territory that might be either strictly or barely defined. The band often has a strong feeling for its home territory.
A band is not cutoff from the rest of the world but interacts with its neighbors. Bands from neighboring regions occasionally meet for ceremonies, to trade goods, and to search for spouses. A trading circle can extend for 1,600 km (1,000 miles). As you picture these circles covering the surface of the planet, you can see that it takes but a few of them to cover an entire continent. This means that we humans are in close touch we each other, and it explains the diffusion of inventions described by Ralph Linton (see Chapter 9).
An example of a trading area is given by the Yir Yorant of Northern Australia (see Lehmann and Myers’ Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural). The people on the northern coast made spears fitted with the barbed spines of ocean stingrays. Three hundred miles away (five hundred kilometers), the southern people made axes from locally available stone. The people of the north made spears but not axes, while the southern people made axes but not spears. In the north, twelve spears were traded for one axe, while in the south it is was the opposite, twelve axes were traded for one spear. In the middle region, one axe was traded for one spear. The middle people made neither axes nor spears, but kept some of each to trade in both directions.
News, techniques, genes, and diseases travel from one group of people to the next as they cross a continent in a short time. For example, as sixteenth-century Spanish explorers arrived in Florida, they brought watermelon that did not exist in the new world. Twenty years later, when other Spanish explorers arrived in New Mexico, which is two thousand miles (3,200 km) away from Florida, watermelon was there already. (For panoramic views of many Spanish missions, visit www.ca-missions.org/contact.html, and to see the original documents of explorers, visit www.americanjourneys.org.) The particular news of contact with Europeans was also known to have been spread by natives at a rate of about three hundred miles (five hundred kilometers) per month. When you went to the next trading ceremony, you too would be anxious to tell others about these strangers. Those of us humans who are Lakota have a special person, called a Klmani or news-walker, whose job is to travel between villages gathering and passing news. Most news concerns births, deaths, weddings, feasts, and battles and such. Visit www.sunsinger.org/bhcom/lakota.php for information about the Lakota today.
Often two bands have an arrangement where the members of each of the two bands obtain their spouses from the other band. (This relationship is described by the technical term exogamy. In everyday language, this is what occurs whenever young men and women are placed within about a fifteen day walk of each other.) Marriage systems are explained at www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/tutor/marriage/toc.html. Sometimes more than two bands are involved in this process. For example, the members from band A must marry people from band B, band B members must marry persons from band C, and band C members marry persons from band A. A newly married couple commonly live with the husband's family. This means that mom came from a neighboring band and that your sisters will move away. This is called patrilocal, reciprocal band exogamy. Anthropologists try to deduce why it is more common that wives move instead of husbands by guessing which aspect of culture might make the closeness of males more beneficial than the closeness of females. For example, is a particular culture built upon male hunting and war groups, or is the culture's most important feature the gardening and sale of women's crops. Many other living arrangements occur in the cultures of the world. Occasionally, groups have a rule that if a husband or wife dies then he or she is to be replaced by the younger brother or sister of the deceased. This is described as a levirate or sororate arrangement. The Bible mentions this custom.
In Chapter 7 we saw that the availability of food determined whether any given mammal species hunted individually or in packs. Food resources also play a role in determining the size of human groups. Some bands are composed of a single family group, such as occurs in the Western Nevada Shoshone, the Paiute, and the Eskimo. Often individual families forage on their own during the sparser seasons and then come together during the summer for ceremonies and such. In the case of big game hunters, all the group’s families stay together because it is beneficial to have larger numbers of people. In this case, the families of brothers often stay in adjacent areas. In the case of people who fish or collect shellfish, larger numbers are not needed so the families separate.
Each twenty-five member band has six to eight working males. Archaeological studies of living areas show that prehistoric bands contained similar numbers of peoples. Band population densities amount to less than one person per square mile (2.5 per square km). If the group gets much larger, it no longer follows reciprocal exogamy.
These ubiquitous bands are egalitarian. They have no economic institutions, no markets, and no consumer classes. The raw materials needed to make the tools of daily life are readily available to everyone. Each person makes clothes, hammocks, and bows and such for themselves. Some projects, such as canoe and house building, require the combined efforts of several persons.
We saw in Chapter 8 that we humans have an innate, biological predisposition to form social groups. The exact form of that social group is not genetically pre-programmed. Through time, humans have modified their social structures to include increasing numbers of persons through mergers of existing groups of persons. There have also been changes in the form of societal "glue" that holds the group together. This glue might be due to family ties, clan membership, or nationalism.
Tribes are more complex arrangements of persons than are bands. A tribe is a collection of bands. Each band had already been familiar with the others before the tribe formed. These bands are not held together by family ties but are instead held together with more complicated associations, a "clan" for example. About five hundred persons make a tribe. A tribe consists of persons who share language and culture to the extent that they have a feeling of unity. The tribe is more than a collection of bands, but it is a fragile structure.
Tribalism often begins as a means to coordinate an agricultural surplus, such as occurs when farming first begins to be practiced in an area. Tribal society largely emerged with the first farmers. Sometimes tribalism emerges as a means to coordinate scarce resources. For example, in a region of generally low rainfall, one valley might receive enough rain to grow crops while a neighboring valley receives too little. This might cause the people from five nearby valleys to begin cooperating to make it through the dryer years. Other tribes have been created as a defensive response to an older, neighboring tribe which is beginning to make raids. Tribal structures always allow military resources greater than that of the band.
The ideal, hypothetical tribe has a name, a language, a defended area, and a number of bands. It has a structure of government surmounted by a leader who embodies the people's will. This leader is chosen but can also be unchosen. Dialects and intermarrying areas may result in the tribe having fuzzy borders. Often the tribe varies in time, space, and season, making it hard to pin down because it is constantly changing. A tribe can become an ethnological mixture of peoples. The tribes of pre-European New Guinea were unstable shifting alignments of clans. For this reason, anthropologists have a range of definitions of tribal systems.
The tribe is a temporary pause between the lesser-complex band and the more-complex chiefdom or state. It has the potential to become a more complicated form of government. The tribe is often an ad-hoc response to a situation. For example, a tribe may form in response to the development of an adjacent state. There are as many reasons for tribes as there have been tribes. Tribes appear today in response to outsiders forcing the bands of a region to form into a more-formal government.
When a tribe is formed in response to war then the tribe will exist only as long as that war exists. The tribes of North America often appeared in response to invading Europeans. The tribe does not have the means to conduct an all-out campaign, instead it ambushes with small hit-and-run raids. Their objectives are cattle, horses, to drive the enemy out of a favored zone, or to prevent an enemy from expanding into their home area.
Band-like exogamy (choosing spouses from a neighboring village) cannot hold together a large society. Tribes are not held together by the dominance of one band; instead, another integrating force is needed. If you want to know why a people formed a tribe you need only ask what integrating force occurred. A politician or leader doesn't bring the tribe together: an outside force brings it together. No office with real power exists. The chief is chosen because of personal charisma.
A tribe may cooperate in holding land and property in common, settling member's grievances, collaborating in labor, and in sharing and storing food. The members may even live together in a "long-house." Like bands, tribal peoples are egalitarian in that they use simple tools that anyone can make and they produce only primary goods to be consumed.
A chiefdom differs from a tribe in that it has an economic, social, and religious center–a city–that coordinates these activities. Most every chiefdom formed as the greater agricultural productivity of a group of farmers enabled such a large surplus of food that greater population and organization levels occurred, but there have been a few places where gatherable food was so abundant that redistributional chiefdoms formed. At the same time, this abundance blocks any attempt to form a state and impose restrictions on people.) Chiefdoms are redistribution centers such that redistribution becomes a continuous aspect of society rather than occurring only during ceremonial occasions. It can occur that an important leader, such as an irrigation manager, becomes the leader of an emerging chiefdom.
Often chiefdoms arise when people have become sedentary within an area extending across distinct zones of resources. This group of people might live both in high and low elevations, or in high and low rainfall regions, so that a range in crops is available. Instead of the people moving from area to area, these sedentary farmers now move their crops. They might also move wood, fish, game, nuts, and roots.
The origin of a chiefdom can be a response to an outside pressure from another chiefdom or from frequent warfare among tribes. A chiefdom will prevail in a conflict with a tribe. They "prevail" by driving them out, by exterminating them, by keeping them as captives, or by incorporated the enemy as a people into the chiefdom. Chiefs might send their children to marry neighboring chiefs in an attempt to spread their influence, but they will sometimes instead become rivals to the throne. In some case, an extended family of chiefs can unite under one king or queen, as in Polynesia.
A chiefdom might develop to further the relationship between nearby pastoral and farming groups. There must be a nearby group of farmers who will be trading partners before another group can choose to become specialized herders. This reciprocal exchange requires a group-organized surplus production that can then be traded. The goods received as payment are redistributed.
The accumulation, trade, and redistribution of payment require organization, and organization implies leadership. For example, large scale salmon catches and coordinated game drives implies leadership, organization, and a division of labor. The term "game drives" refer to sites such as those that archaeologists have excavated at the bottom of cliffs. These sites contain the bones of many animals and indicate that people had organized into a cooperative unit to direct the moving animals along a path that led them over a cliff for easy harvesting.
As tribes grow into chiefdoms, specialized occupations develop. The quality of work of a full-time craft specialist is greater than that of a "jack of all trades." When some members of society are able to spend their entire lifetimes producing a single item, they will then gain the expertise necessary to create a higher caliber of finished work. This sudden improvement in the quality of crafted objects is evident in archaeological excavations.
The chief organizes labor into public works, such as the terracing of slopes, the construction of irrigation works, or the building of palaces or temples. In turn, these works might increase crop production and enable an increase in the population level. The public works of a chiefdom are usually confined to one valley. In the valleys of Mexico and Mesopotamia, and in the Indus and Yellow River areas, water control projects built canals connecting many valleys and lead to the formation of more-complex state systems of government.
Food and other necessities are being received, stored, and redistributed, and a portion is being paid to specialists by the chief. The redistributor–that is, the person who redistributes–occurs in bands and chiefdoms. This person was probably given the job because she or he was the most respected person due to having been the biggest contributor. When the redistributor's job becomes full-time then things change such that this person now gets respect simply by being the redistributor.
A hereditary office of chief might then occur, and soon after that, the chief’s family and children, and children's children, form a nobility. Genealogical lists become longer and more important in inherited chiefdoms. This is done to help legitimize the position of the current chief. A band is egalitarian–chiefdoms are not. The office makes the chief who then makes the nobility that results in social stratification. After a few generations, the chief's position becomes sanctified by custom and mythology. Exogamy can be replaced with endogamy by social rank, where nobles marry other nobles from the same village.
The religion of a chiefdom begins with its shamanism and life-cycle rituals and then adds ceremonies of a wider social purpose. Ancestor worship often increases. Some groups of people begin to consider their ancestors to be supernatural beings. A priesthood emerges as permanent professionals begin to officiate over ceremonies. Chiefs and priests often arise together, and often both become inherited offices. Sometimes the same person holds both offices in what is called a theocracy.
The redistributional economy of a chiefdom has potential for expanding its population or its borders–tribes and bands do not. When the chiefdom brings together diverse regions, it is beneficial to all its members. Sometimes a chiefdom later incorporates new members, bringing benefits to both old and new members in that the old members have new resources while the new members gain access to the resources of the old members.
The chiefdom doesn't have the state's monopoly of force and do not have a police force with a "license to kill." A feud can occur in a chiefdom but not in the presence of a state government having a license to kill because the feud is rapidly quelled. The existence of a feud signifies a lack of government. For example, in the nineteenth-century frontier of the Western U.S., feuds (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield-McCoy_feud) could develop because there was little government around. In fact, the moral to the story of many "Western Cowboy" movies is that people should help each other provide mutual protection from injustice and the unlawful because little local law enforcement existed.
There are as many reasons for the origin of a chiefdom as there are chiefdoms. Sometimes a chief has privileges, sometimes not. Digging-stick horticulture groups may have a chief with prestige and privilege. The privileges include things such as doing no manual labor, having multiple wives, or farming the best garden spot. Horticulturists use hoes, plows, terracing, and sometimes have a highly developed political organization. Agriculturists use advanced irrigation and have a political organization more advanced than that of horticulturists in that they may have stratified classes. A bureaucracy is always needed to manage large scale irrigation.
Ranked and socially stratified society
Each society has prestigious positions. A ranked society is one in which the positions of valued status are somehow limited, causing the number of positions to be fewer than the number of talented persons. Ranked society is associated with domestication or with the exploitation of concentrated food sources, such as a fish-rich stream. The beginning of the narrowing and the institutionalizing of the positions of rank can be due to the creation of irrigation or to the emergence of the redistribution of surpluses. This can also happen with the initial development of foreign trade. For example, Mesopotamia began to trade with the gold regions of what would become the state of Egypt. The Mesopotamians knew the gold was there because they had been trading since the time of bands. The Mesopotamian state encouraged the gold mining operations to become increased in scale. The occupants of the gold region organized politically in response to the presented opportunity. This situation occurred in many places around the world.
Soon after ranking has occurred, the members of a society will no longer have equal access to the raw materials of the items of daily life. This is a stratified society. Ranking provides a skeleton on which stratification can grow. A stratified society is usually a short-lived system because once stratification occurs, a state quickly follows. The maintenance of stratification demands sanctions that must be commanded by a level of power beyond the resources of a chiefdom or of a system based on kinship.
A kinship system adequately holds together the members of an egalitarian society but not the members of a ranked society. The unequal access to the basic means of livelihood and the exploitation of labor in the ranked society create new pressures that cause the destruction of the kinship system. (Does this mean that the extended family is outweighed by society? By rank?) There is also a shift in post-marital residence customs.
Some form of unequal access always precedes the formation of a state. To continue to exist, this unequal access requires powerful institutions of political control. There can be any of a number of items of unequal access. People might have unequal access to irrigation water due to the distance between their plot and the canals. Sometimes a new and exceptionally useful resource, like bamboo, ore, or a special stone may become the main raw-material for making the tools of daily life. Capital goods will then appear. The impingement of a distant market system can also lead to the development of a stratified state that controls the objects of the market. As occurred, for example, when some Greek and Roman villages began to trade with the states of the Middle East around the year 1000 bc (We'll see in Chapter 14 that democracy in Ancient Athens developed in response to these traders who began to dominate all aspects of town life.)
Archaeological evidence of stratification includes differences in burial goods and in house types. Sometimes the existence of haves and have-nots can be measured archaeologically as differences in the health of individuals–for example, in the chemical contents of their bones. Measured bone strontium levels are inversely proportional to meat intake and directly proportional to height. If the members of a population are seen to have had two levels of bone-strontium, then that society contained two levels of wealth.
Stratification and its unequal access to basic resources, develops during a time of simple tools and appears before metallurgy and complex, full-time craft specialization emerge. In a band, tools can be made by anyone because the resources are readily available. Stratification first occurs as basic resources are being converted from communal to private property. The opportunity for a pristine, stratified state to independently develop ended about 2,000 years ago. After that time, states and their interactions became too numerous for an independent state to exist. An approximate model of a stratified state has to be extrapolated from the characteristics of the earliest known states.(There are also known examples of stratified but stateless societies.)
The pristine state develops with no knowledge of constitutions, legislatures, bureaucracies, or armies–only lineage heads and temporary chiefs. Most emerging states were surrounded by, and interacting with, other emerging states with whom they shared trade and rivalry. Notice that a professional military doesn't occur prior to the stratification of a society and that a state can always overrun a neighboring, less organized chiefdom. Many states are devoted to military expansion but usually have trouble effectively exploiting the labor of a forcibly conquered people. Sometimes a number of small chiefdoms are united to create a much more powerful state. As a result, the temporary war leader might become the permanent leader who then comes to control all departments of the society instead of just the war department. When the leader controls a wide range of activities, the society is less able to remove him or her even when performing poorly. While the most able person is selected by consensus to be the leader in a tribe, this consensus is more difficult to obtain in more populous state entities. Since the election itself is dangerous in that it can be a source of social trouble, some groups avoid this danger by making leadership hereditary.
An ideological basis can help a leader maintain the group's consent and obedience and also help that leader to remain in power. The ideological basis might be a "mandate from heaven," a state religion, or a belief that the leader has the status of a god or is a descendant from the god who founded the state. No known state ever lacked an ideology that legitimized its power and sanctioned its use of force, and every known state has had a physical apparatus for removing those who didn't cooperate.
Trade to acquire missing resources–including flint for arrows, raw materials for grinding stones, or wood for other needs–requires both a trade network and leaders for the trade network. Since these leaders have an advantage of easier access to the traded goods, this leads to a stratified society. And these leaders sometimes manage to form a state government to perpetuate their advantages. In contrast, states do not develop in regions where food is easily obtained, such as in the jungle, Hawaii, parts of California, and the northwestern coast of the United States. The political organization of these regions never became more complex than that of a chiefdom.
Irrigation systems requires administrators to direct the number of persons needed to build, clean, and repair the canals. Administrators are professional managers who do no farming themselves. A group of a just few hundred persons wouldn't need this type of administrator. Separate hierarchies might oversee the defense of the system against outsiders, the system's time-keeping–that is, choosing when to plant and when to begin and stop watering–and the construction of the large-scale temples that serve to worship the agricultural gods. The need for maintenance and construction lead to bureaucrats, defense leads to generals, and agricultural timing and worship lead to astronomers and priests. With continued growth, managers of managers are needed. When there are about three hierarchical levels of managers then the system might be seen to be complex enough to call it a state, and this hierarchy becomes the state. A single leader might occur at the top of the hierarchy, and this single leader might be elected or the position may become hereditary. This would be an example of the "integration" origin of a state that develops to coordinate and regulate the different parts of a society that is becoming larger and more complex.
Other political systems develop through what is termed the "conflict" origin of a state, which describes many of the states and empires that have occurred in the last 5,000 years. Before the state forms in such a case, a portion of the group's members may simply have greater access to water because their farmlands are closer to the irrigation canals. This sometimes divides people into haves and have-nots, resulting in the formation of a wealthier class. The haves may control the irrigation apparatus or the trade materials and its network, and in turn, might form a state government to legitimize and perpetuate their privileged position. State government is often begun by, and is composed of, those persons who control the assets and wealth of a group. In this case the state is these persons of greater assets and wealth. That is, the owner and controller of the assets, the state leader, and the state government, are all one and the same person or group. Wealth and government are not often under the separate control of different persons. It is rarely the case that the state leader has no assets but tells the asset-holders what to do with their wealth; the asset holder is usually also the political leader, and sometimes this leader becomes a tyrant.
A state might form in response to warfare, trade, or irrigation, but the resulting form of a state will depend on the region's resources and neighbors. The power of a leader is determined by the number of persons and the amount of resources he or she can control. For this reason, states often perform a census for taxation purposes and require that a tax be paid in materials or labor. This leads to problems of record keeping that are solved by the inventions of arithmetic and writing. Writing and arithmetic never occurred before states existed because a band of fifty persons would have little need for such records.
There is a large range in the populations of states. In Mexico, the Olmec state contained 20,000 persons while Teotihuacan contained 200,000 persons. (Archaeologists estimate population figures from the measured size of excavated community projects and the calculated number of years needed to construct them.) In Peru, the first monuments and the origin of agriculture happened at the same time. The monuments were so large that they could have been built in no other way except as a project involving a large community.
The band is the natural grouping of humans and is our original and smallest socio-political unit. Since it consists of twenty to one-hundred persons comprising a few extended families held together by their strong family ties, it differs little from those of other primates. It is a small, egalitarian community in constant face-to-face interaction that makes decisions through the consensus of family heads. Differing levels of wealth do not occur because everyone has easy and equal access to all of the items needed for daily life. Band members collect food and raw materials from the surrounding area. Each band is independent but not isolated. Band members are usually required to marry members from a neighboring band and so have some affinal relations with adjacent bands.
Tribe, chiefdom, and state societies represent steps in the organization of increasingly larger numbers of persons. These organizations occur because of the net benefits they bring to their members, but it is often the case that the benefits are not shared equally by each of its members. A tribe is a collection of bands that form as a temporary response to an external force and is sometimes held together by clan membership. A chiefdom has a city that coordinates religious activities and the production and redistribution of food. Its greater economic productivity enables a surplus to accumulate, populations to grow, and states to form. The state is identified by stratified society, unequal access to goods or tools, permanent leaders and priests, and monumental architecture built by the public. The leaders of the state are often the persons who have greater access to those items of wealth, or own them. A state and its unequal access cannot be held together by family and kinship ties alone.
These political categories can blur, so some anthropologists prefer to use fewer categories. A particular region's political groupings are constantly shifting in response to the circumstances at home and in response to the neighboring political groupings. Most any political arrangement and cause of origin that you can think of has probably occurred.
Will this trend toward increasing larger political units continue and result in some future form of world-wide organization of humanity. It is easy to see the benefits of pooling worldwide resources when building large-scale projects, but the pooling of resources is not government or law. People prefer local law and local government because of the local differences in culture. I cannot imagine a single worldwide government until the world contains a single culture. When the world contains a single culture, it will be a far less interesting place.
In the coming chapters we will see how our ideas of personal liberty, individual rights, and democracy developed in response to a lack of certain freedoms and self-governance due to the excesses of some of our kings and queens. We'll see what democracy was like in Ancient Athens and compare this with today's democracy. We'll also see how power is shared among the leaders of the democracy of today's United States. Some features of modern, authoritarian government will be described and the aspects of culture that make for stable democracy will be discussed in the coming chapters.
Questions
1. Give examples of groups of us humans who live in bands, tribes, or chiefdoms.
2. Is there any relation between a particular group's political form and its culture?
3. Will a person's daily activities change as his or her band organizes into a tribe? How about the transition from tribe to chiefdom? From chiefdom to state?
4. If your family and one hundred other families went to an island to start a community, what sort of government would you choose to form?
5. Will there be a single world government in the future? Are there any reasons to create such a thing? What would its purpose be? What would hold together all of the people of the world?
6. What is the purpose of having bands? How about tribes, chiefdoms, and states? What is the purpose of government?
7. How is a band of human families different from a macaque matrilene?
8. Is your leader's position legitimized by an ideological view?
9. Do the members of your society have equal access to the items necessary for daily life?
10. Are there any relationships between the leaders of your state and the holders of wealth?
11. How many persons would be needed to build a small hill out of dirt?
12. What is feudalism? How is it related to bands, tribes, chiefs, or states?
13. What holds together the people of your city? Your nation? How would your feeling of attachment for your city or nation change if you were related to every member? What would be the goals and priorities of your city's government if every person in town were members of a single extended family?
14. What are the characteristics of a good chief, king, or queen?
15. Does chimpanzee society have anything in common with human bands, tribes, chiefdoms, or states?
16. How is a group's form of religion related to its form of government?
17. Create a piece of art that explains how you feel about political systems.
18. Did feuds develop within bands, tribes, or chiefdoms?
19. What are the priorities of the leaders of a band? Of a tribe, chiefdom, and state? What are the priorities of the leaders of your nation? What do you feel should be the priorities of your city and nation? What are the priorities of your family?
20. How do you blend the differing priorities of persons within your nation?
21. Compare social and economic inequality within bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. How much inequality is tolerable by group members? Should we strive to minimize inequality? How much should we allow?
22. What is democracy? Compare the democratic elements of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.
23. What is a dictatorship?
24. Which forms of government have been imperialistic?
25. Compare the abilities of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, dictatorships, and democracies to choose priorities and accomplish goals.
26. Which is more important, the individual, the family, or the group?
27. We saw that the dispute settler in primate society could not show favoritism toward family members because the lives of every member of the group depends on the continuation of the group. For a political office holder, does the obligation to all members of society outweigh the obligations to the extended family? Have you seen a situation in which social, economic, or political rank outweighed kinship, or was it the other way around? We humans have an innate predisposition to cooperate as an extended family within a larger social group, but since it is found that a kinship system adequately holds together the members of an egalitarian society but not the members of a ranked society, does society outweigh family? Do siblings ever get on the opposite sides of a political dispute, join opposing armies, and fight one another? What sorts of business transactions occur between members of the nuclear and extended family?
28. Does the political system in place during your childhood seem like the only natural form of government? How does it compare to other types of government?
Primary sources for the chapter
The Evolution of Political Society by Morton H. Fried, 1967, Random House, New York.
The Formation of the State, Lawrence Krader, 1968, Prentice-Hall New Jersey.
The Evolution of the Prehistoric State by Jonathan Haas, 1982, Columbia University Press, New York.
Suggestions for further reading
Primitive Social Organization An evolutionary Perspective 2nd Edition, Elman R Service, 1971, Random House, New York.
Human Societies An Introduction to Macrosociology third edition, Gerhard Lenski and Jean Lenski, 1978, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York.
Fire and the Spirits, Cherokee Law from Clan to Court, Rennard Strickland, 1975, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman Ok.
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