Chiefdom

Last updated

A chiefdom is a political organization of people represented or governed by a chief. Chiefdoms have been discussed, depending on their scope, as a stateless, state analogue or early state system or institution. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Usually a chief's position is based on kinship, which is often monopolized by the legitimate senior members of select families or 'houses'. These elites can form a political-ideological aristocracy relative to the general group. [4]

Chiefdoms and chiefs are sometimes identified as the same as kingdoms and kings, and therefore understood as monarchies, particularly when they are understood as not necessarily states, but having monarchic representation or government. [2]

Concept

In anthropological theory, one model of human social development rooted in ideas of cultural evolution describes a chiefdom as a form of social organization more complex than a tribe or a band society, and less complex than a state or a civilization.

Within general theories of cultural evolution, chiefdoms are characterized by permanent and institutionalized forms of political leadership (the chief), centralized decision-making, economic interdependence, and social hierarchy.

Chiefdoms are described as intermediate between tribes and states in the progressive scheme of sociopolitical development formulated by Elman Service: band - tribe - chiefdom - state. [5] A chief's status is based on kinship, so it is inherited or ascribed, in contrast to the achieved status of Big Man leaders of tribes. [6] Another feature of chiefdoms is therefore pervasive social inequality. They are ranked societies, according to the scheme of progressive sociopolitical development formulated by Morton Fried: egalitarian - ranked - stratified - state. [7]

The most succinct definition of a chiefdom in anthropology is by Robert L. Carneiro: "An autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief" (Carneiro 1981: 45).

Chiefdoms in archaeological theory

In archaeological theory, Service's definition of chiefdoms as “redistribution societies with a permanent central agency of coordination” (Service 1962: 144) has been most influential. Many archaeologists, however, dispute Service's reliance upon redistribution as central to chiefdom societies, and point to differences in the basis of finance (staple finance v. wealth finance). [8] Service argued that chief rose to assume a managerial status to redistribute agricultural surplus to ecologically specialized communities within this territory (staple finance). Yet in re-studying the Hawaiian chiefdoms used as his case study, Timothy Earle observed that communities were rather self-sufficient. What the chief redistributed was not staple goods, but prestige goods to his followers that helped him to maintain his authority (wealth finance). [9]

Some scholars contest the utility of the chiefdom model for archaeological inquiry. The most forceful critique comes from Timothy Pauketat, whose Chiefdom and Other Archaeological Delusions [10] outlines how chiefdoms fail to account for the high variability of the archaeological evidence for middle-range societies. Pauketat argues that the evolutionary underpinnings of the chiefdom model are weighed down by racist and outdated theoretical baggage that can be traced back to Lewis Morgan's 19th-century cultural evolution. From this perspective, pre-state societies are treated as underdeveloped, the savage and barbaric phases that preceded civilization. Pauketat argues that the chiefdom type is a limiting category that should be abandoned, and takes as his main case study Cahokia, a central place for the Mississippian culture of North America.

Pauketat's provocation, however, fails to offer a sound alternative to the chiefdom type. For while he claims that chiefdoms are a delusion, he describes Cahokia as a civilization. This upholds rather than challenges the evolutionary scheme he contests. [11] [ further explanation needed ]

Simple category

Chiefdoms are characterized by the centralization of authority and pervasive inequality. At least two inherited social classes (elite and commoner) are present. (The ancient Hawaiian chiefdoms had as many as four social classes.) An individual might change social class during a lifetime by extraordinary behavior. A single lineage/family of the elite class becomes the ruling elite of the chiefdom, with the greatest influence, power, and prestige. Kinship is typically an organizing principle, while marriage, age, and sex can affect one's social status and role.

A single simple chiefdom is generally composed of a central community surrounded by or near a number of smaller subsidiary communities. All of the communities recognize the authority of a single kin group or individual with hereditary centralized power, dwelling in the primary community. Each community will have its own leaders, which are usually in a tributary and/or subservient relationship to the ruling elite of the primary community.

Complex category

A complex chiefdom is a group of simple chiefdoms controlled by a single paramount center and ruled by a paramount chief. Complex chiefdoms have two or even three tiers of political hierarchy. Nobles are clearly distinct from commoners and do not usually engage in any form of agricultural production. The higher members of society consume most of the goods that are passed up the hierarchy as a tribute.

Reciprocal obligations are fulfilled by the nobles carrying out rituals that only they can perform. They may also make token, symbolic redistributions of food and other goods. In two- or three-tiered chiefdoms, higher-ranking chiefs have control over a number of lesser ranking individuals, each of whom controls specific territory or social units. Political control rests on the chief's ability to maintain access to a sufficiently large body of tribute, passed up the line by lesser chiefs. These lesser chiefs in turn collect from those below them, from communities close to their own center. At the apex of the status hierarchy sits the paramount.

Anthropologists and archaeologists have demonstrated through research that chiefdoms are a relatively unstable form of social organization. They are prone to cycles of collapse and renewal, in which tribal units band together, expand in power, fragment through some form of social stress, and band together again. An example of this kind of social organization were the Germanic Peoples who conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. Although commonly referred to as tribes, anthropologists classified their society as chiefdoms. They had a complex social hierarchy consisting of kings, a warrior aristocracy, common freemen, serfs, and slaves.

The Native American tribes sometimes had ruling kings or satraps (governors) in some areas and regions. The Cherokee, for example, had an imperial-family ruling system over a long period of history. The early Spanish explorers in the Americas reported on the Indian kings and kept extensive notes during what is now called the conquest. Some of the native tribes in the Americas had princes, nobles, and various classes and castes. The "Great Sun" was somewhat like the Great Khans of Asia and eastern Europe. Much like an emperor, the Great Sun of North America is the best example of chiefdoms and imperial kings in North American Indian history. The Aztecs of Mexico had a similar culture.

Chiefdoms on the Indian subcontinent

The Indus Valley Civilisation (3300 BCE - 1700 BCE) was a hegemony of chiefdoms with supreme chiefs in each and a system of subsidiary chiefs. The ranks of the chiefs included ordinary chiefs, elders, priests or cattle-owners and head chiefs. [12]

The Arthashastra , a work on politics written some time between the 4th century BC and 2nd century AD by Indian author Chanakya, similarly describes the Rajamandala (or "Raja-mandala,") as circles of friendly and enemy states surrounding the state of a king ( raja ). [13] [14] Also see Suhas Chatterjee, Mizo Chiefs and the Chiefdom (1995). [15]

Chiefdoms in Hispaniola

Native chieftain system in China

Tusi (Chinese : 土司 ), also known as Headmen or Chieftains, were tribal leaders recognized as imperial officials by the Yuan, Ming, and Qing-era Chinese governments, principally in Yunnan. The arrangement is generally known as the Native Chieftain System (Chinese : 土司 制度 ; pinyin :Tǔsī Zhìdù).

Alternatives to chiefdoms

In prehistoric South-West Asia, alternatives to chiefdoms were the non-hierarchical systems of complex acephalous communities, with a pronounced autonomy of single-family households. These communities have been analyzed recently by Berezkin, who suggests the Apa Tanis as their ethnographic parallel (Berezkin 1995). Frantsouzoff (2000) finds a more developed example of such type of polities in ancient South Arabia in the Wadi Hadhramawt of the 1st millennium BCE.

In Southeast Asian history up to the early 19th century, the metaphysical view of the cosmos called the mandala (i.e., circle) is used to describe a Southeast Asian political model, which in turn describes the diffuse patterns of political power distributed among Mueang (principalities) where circles of influence were more important than central power. The concept counteracts modern tendencies to look for unified political power like that of the large European kingdoms and nation states, which one scholar posited were an inadvertent byproduct of 15th-century advances in map-making technologies. [16] [17]

Nikolay Kradin has demonstrated that an alternative to the state seems to be represented by the supercomplex chiefdoms created by some nomads of Eurasia. The number of structural levels within such chiefdoms appears to be equal, or even to exceed those within the average state, but they have a different type of political organization and political leadership. Such types of political entities do not appear to have been created by the agriculturists (e.g., Kradin 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004).

See also

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Civilization</span> Stratified complex society

A civilization is any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tribe</span> Human social group

The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. Its definition is contested, in part due to conflicting theoretical understandings of social and kinship structures, and also reflecting the problematic application of this concept to extremely diverse human societies. The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, ethnicity, nation or state. These terms are similarly disputed. In some cases tribes have legal recognition and some degree of political autonomy from national or federal government, but this legalistic usage of the term may conflict with anthropological definitions.

Autocracy is a system of government in which absolute power is held by the ruler, known as an autocrat. It includes most forms of monarchy and dictatorship, while it is contrasted with democracy and feudalism. Various definitions of autocracy exist. They may restrict autocracy to a single individual, or they may also apply autocracy to a group of rulers who wield absolute power. The autocrat has total control over the exercise of civil liberties within the autocracy, choosing under what circumstances they may be exercised, if at all. Governments may also blend elements of autocracy and democracy, forming an anocracy. The concept of autocracy has been recognized in political philosophy since ancient times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nomad</span> Person without fixed habitat

Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased, reaching an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world as of 1995.

Anagenesis is the gradual evolution of a species that continues to exist as an interbreeding population. This contrasts with cladogenesis, which occurs when there is branching or splitting, leading to two or more lineages and resulting in separate species. Anagenesis does not always lead to the formation of a new species from an ancestral species. When speciation does occur as different lineages branch off and cease to interbreed, a core group may continue to be defined as the original species. The evolution of this group, without extinction or species selection, is anagenesis.

A heterarchy is a system of organization where the elements of the organization are unranked (non-hierarchical) or where they possess the potential to be ranked a number of different ways. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same "horizontal" position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role. In biological taxonomy, however, the requisite features of heterarchy involve, for example, a species sharing, with a species in a different family, a common ancestor which it does not share with members of its own family. This is theoretically possible under principles of "horizontal gene transfer".

A complex society is a concept that is shared by a range of disciplines including anthropology, archaeology, history and sociology to describe a stage of social formation. The concept was formulated by scholars attempting to understand how modern states emerged, specifically the transition from small kin-based societies to large hierarchically structured societies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eurasian nomads</span> Nomadic peoples

The Eurasian nomads were groups of nomadic peoples living throughout the Eurasian Steppe, who are largely known from frontier historical sources from Europe and Asia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrey Korotayev</span> Russian anthropologist, economic historian, comparative political scientist, and sociologist

Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev is a Russian anthropologist, economic historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist, with major contributions to world-systems theory, cross-cultural studies, Near Eastern history, Big History, and mathematical modelling of social and economic macrodynamics.

The circumscription theory is a theory of the role of warfare in state formation in political anthropology, created by anthropologist Robert Carneiro. The theory has been summarized in one sentence by Schacht: “In areas of circumscribed agricultural land, population pressure led to warfare that resulted in the evolution of the state”. The more circumscribed an agricultural area is, Carneiro argues, the sooner it politically unifies.

<i>Social Evolution & History</i> Academic journal

Social Evolution & History is a peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the development of human societies in the past, present, and future. In addition to original research articles, Social Evolution & History includes critical notes and a book review section. It is published in English twice a year, in March and September, by Uchitel Publishing House. The editors-in-chief are Dmitri Bondarenko, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev.

Leonid Efimovich Grinin is a Russian philosopher of history, sociologist, political anthropologist, economist, and futurologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dmitri Bondarenko</span> Russian historian, anthropologist and Africanist

Dmitri Mikhailovich Bondarenko is a Russian anthropologist, historian, and Africanist. He has conducted field research in a number of African countries and among Black people in Russia and the United States. He is Principal Research Fellow and Vice-Director for Research with the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the International Center of Anthropology of the HSE University, and Full Professor in Ethnology with the Center of Social Anthropology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. He holds the titles of Professor in Ethnology from the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Global Problems and International Relations, and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in History.

Timothy R. Pauketat is an American archaeologist, director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, the Illinois State Archaeologist, and professor of anthropology and medieval studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is known for his historical theories and his investigations at Cahokia, the major center of precolonial Mississippian culture in the American Bottom region of Illinois near St. Louis, Missouri.

Robert Leonard Carneiro was an American anthropologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History who is widely held to be one of the prominent sociocultural evolutionists. He is mostly known for his Circumscription theory which explains how early political states may have formed as a result of interactions between environmental constraints, population pressures, and warfare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nikolay Kradin</span> Russian anthropologist and archaeologist

Nikolay Nikolaevich Kradin is a Russian anthropologist and archaeologist. Since 1985 he has been a Research Fellow of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology, Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok. He was Head and Professor of the Department of Social Anthropology in the Far-Eastern National Technical University, and also Head and Professor of the Department of World History, Archaeology and Anthropology in the Far-Eastern Federal University. Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2011 and full Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2022.

Homoarchy is "the relation of elements to one another when they are rigidly ranked one way only, and thus possess no potential for being unranked or ranked in another or a number of different ways at least without cardinal reshaping of the whole socio-political order."

Tessaleno Campos Devezas is a Brazilian-born Portuguese physicist, systems theorist, and materials scientist. He is best known for his contributions to the long waves theory in socioeconomic development, technological evolution, energy systems as well as world system analysis.

A world-system is a socioeconomic system, under systems theory, that encompasses part or all of the globe, detailing the aggregate structural result of the sum of the interactions between polities. World-systems are usually larger than single states, but do not have to be global. The Westphalian System is the preeminent world-system operating in the contemporary world, denoting the system of sovereign states and nation-states produced by the Westphalian Treaties in 1648. Several world-systems can coexist, provided that they have little or no interaction with one another. Where such interactions becomes significant, separate world-systems merge into a new, larger world-system. Through the process of globalization, the modern world has reached the state of one dominant world-system, but in human history there have been periods where separate world-systems existed simultaneously, according to Janet Abu-Lughod. The most well-known version of the world-system approach has been developed by Immanuel Wallerstein. A world-system is a crucial element of the world-system theory, a multidisciplinary, macro-scale approach to world history and social change.

Henri Joannes Maria Claessen was a Dutch cultural anthropologist who specialised in the early state. He was Professor Emeritus in Social Anthropology at Leiden University, as well as an honorary member of several scholarly institutions ; Center for Asian and Pacific Studies ; Honorary Lifetime Member of the IUAES.

References

  1. Claessen, Henri J. M. (September 2022). "Before the early state and after". Social Evolution & History. 21 (2). Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  2. 1 2 "Chiefdoms and kingdoms in Africa: Why they are neither states nor empires". African Studies Centre Leiden. 2002-02-21. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  3. Grinin, Leonid (2022). "Complex Chiefdoms vs Early States: The Evolutionary Perspective". Evolution: Trajectories of Social Evolution. pp. 96–129. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  4. Helm, Mary (2010). Access to Origins: Affines, Ancestors, and Aristocrats. Austin, TX: Univ Of Texas Press. p. 4. ISBN   9780292723740. OCLC   640095710.
  5. Service, Elman R (1976). Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective . Chicago, IL: Random House. ISBN   0394316355. OCLC   974107713.
  6. Sahlins, Marshall D. (1963). "Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 5 (3): 285–303. doi: 10.1017/S0010417500001729 . ISSN   1475-2999. S2CID   145254059.
  7. Fried, Morton Herbert (1976). The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. McGraw-Hill. ISBN   0075535793. OCLC   748982203.
  8. Earle, Timothy, ed. (2004). Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology. Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN   0521448018. OCLC   611267761.
  9. "Timothy Earle: Department of Anthropology". Northwestern University. 2017-03-30. Archived from the original on 2017-03-30.
  10. Pauketat, Timothy R (2011). Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions. AltaMira Press. ISBN   9780759108295. OCLC   768479880.
  11. Beck, Robin (2009). "On Delusions". Native South. 2: 111–120. doi:10.1353/nso.0.0011. S2CID   201784072.
  12. Fairservis, W.A. (1992). The Harappan Civilization and Its Writing: A Model for the Decipherment of the Indus Script. E.J. Brill. p. 133. ISBN   978-81-204-0491-5.
  13. Avari, Burjor (2007). India, the Ancient Past: A History of the Indian Sub-continent from C. 7000 BC to AD 1200. Taylor & Francis. pp. 188–189. ISBN   978-0415356152. Archived from the original on 2022-10-12. Retrieved 2015-11-20.
  14. Singh, Prof. Mahendra Prasad (2011). Indian Political Thought: Themes and Thinkers. Pearson Education India. pp. 11–13. ISBN   978-8131758519. Archived from the original on 2022-10-12. Retrieved 2015-11-20.
  15. Chatterjee, Suhas (1995). Mizo Chiefs and the Chiefdom. Publications Pvt. Ltd. ISBN   8185880727. Archived from the original on 2022-10-12. Retrieved 2015-11-20.
  16. "How Maps Made the World". Wilson Quarterly . Summer 2011. Archived from the original on 11 August 2011. Retrieved 28 July 2011. Source: 'Mapping the Sovereign State: Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change' by Jordan Branch, in International Organization , Volume 65, Issue 1, Winter 2011
  17. Branch, Jordan Nathaniel (2011). Mapping the Sovereign State: Cartographic Technology, Political Authority, and Systemic Change (Ph.D. thesis). University of California, Berkeley. pp. 1–36. doi: 10.1017/S0020818310000299 . 3469226. Archived from the original on June 29, 2017. Retrieved March 5, 2012. Abstract: How did modern territorial states come to replace earlier forms of organization, defined by a wide variety of territorial and non-territorial forms of authority? Answering this question can help to explain both where our international political system came from and where it might be going....