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Political Anthropology: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Learning Objectives

• All cultures exercise social control over their members.
• As societies become more complex, so do their means of control.
• Political anthropology studies these means of control.
• Identify the four levels of socio-cultural integration (band, tribe, chiefdom, and state) and describe their characteristics.
• Compare systems of leadership in egalitarian and non-egalitarian societies.
• Describe systems used in tribes and chiefdoms to achieve social integration and encourage connections between people.
• Assess the benefits and problems associated with state-level political organizations.

Basic Concepts in Political Anthropology

• Power: The ability to induce behavior of others through coercion or force.
  • Examples: Gulags in Stalinist Russia, death camps in Nazi Germany, Supermax prisons like Pelican Bay, and Guantanamo Bay.
• Authority: The ability to induce behavior of others through persuasion.
  • Typical in forager societies.
• Power and authority exist on a continuum in every society.
  • Hitler used rallies to persuade the German population.
  • Soviet leaders held parades to persuade people to remain attached to their vision of a communal society.
  • Even societies that use authority have coercive power. For example, the Inuit punish those who violate group norms, sometimes by homicide.
• Legitimacy: The perception that an individual has a valid right to leadership.
  • Historically based on hereditary succession, often granted to the eldest son.
  • In agricultural states like ancient Mesopotamia, the Aztec, and the Inca, rule was justified by hereditary succession.
    • Example: Inca emperor Atahualpa's uncertain rule when the Spaniards arrived in Peru in 1533 after he defeated his brother Huascar.
  • Supernatural beliefs were used to establish legitimacy.
    • Incan emperors: Sun God.
    • Aztec rulers: Huitzilopochtli.
    • European monarchs: Divine right to rule reinforced by the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.
    • India: Dominance of the Brahmin elite justified by karma.
  • Secular equivalents: Worker’s paradise in the Soviet Union and racial purity of Aryans in Nazi Germany.
  • Democratic forms of government: Legitimacy rests on the consent of the governed in periodic elections, as in the United States.
• Reverse dominance: Societies where people reject attempts by any individual to exercise power.
  • Achieved through ridicule, criticism, disobedience, and banishment.
  • Example: Richard Lee's experience with the !Kung, who ridiculed the fattened ox he presented to them.
• Even in egalitarian societies, decisions must be made through consensus, often guided by persuasive figures (headmen).
• Reinforcements for compliance:
  • Positive reinforcements: Rewards for compliance (medals, financial incentives, public recognition).
  • Negative reinforcements: Punishments for noncompliance (fines, imprisonment, death sentences).
  • These reinforcements exist in every human society, even those without written laws. Reverse dominance is one form of negative reinforcement.

Levels of Socio-Cultural Integration

• Family functions as a political unit in many small communities.
  • Example: Julian Steward's description of the Shoshone, where the family was the reproductive, economic, educational, political, and religious unit.
• In larger societies, these functions are taken over by larger social institutions.
  • Economy is managed by authority figures who demand taxes.
  • Education is managed by schools under governmental authority.
  • Family authority is subsumed under the power of the state.
• Anthropologists use levels of socio-cultural integration to assess political organizations.

Elman Service's Four Levels of Socio-Cultural Integration:

1. Band: Smallest unit, few families, no formal leadership.
2. Tribe: Larger populations, organized around family ties, temporary leadership.
3. Chiefdom: Large political units, hereditary chief holds formal power.
4. State: Complex, central government with a monopoly on force, bureaucracy, formal laws, standing military.

Categorization of Political Integration:

• Egalitarian: Bands and tribes; no great difference in status or power; as many valued status positions as people to fill them.
• Ranked: Chiefdoms; differences in wealth and status based on relation to the chief; limited positions of power.
• Stratified: State societies; large differences in wealth, status, and power based on unequal access to resources and positions of power; socio-economic classes.

Egalitarian Societies

• Humans are not equal in all things (age, abilities, gender).
• Social classes may seem inevitable in complex societies, but is social class universal?
• Among foragers, there is no advantage to hoarding food and there is little personal property; leadership is informal, thus the basic ingredients for social class do not exist.
• Foragers (e.g., !Kung, Inuit, aboriginal Australians) are egalitarian; few differences in wealth, status, and power.
• Less-skilled hunters receive a share of the meat and have a right to be heard on important decisions.
• Egalitarian societies lack a government or centralized leadership.
• Leaders emerge by consensus; known as headmen or big men.
• Foraging societies are always egalitarian, but so are many horticultural and pastoral societies.
• Egalitarian societies can be bands or tribes.

Band-Level Political Organization

• Typically comprise foragers who are nomadic and few in number (rarely exceeding 100 persons), and form small groups consisting of a few families and a shifting population.
• Lack formal leadership.
  • Richard Lee: The Dobe !Kung had no leaders; each person is headman over themself.
• At most, a band’s leader is primus inter pares: “first among equals.”
• Modesty is valued; arrogance is not acceptable.
• Leadership is transient and subject to shifting circumstances.
  • Paiute: Rabbit bosses coordinated rabbit drives but had no other leadership role.
  • Some leaders are mediators; others are skilled shamans.
• No formal offices or rules of succession.
• Bands may have been the first political unit outside the family.

Organization of Earliest Bands (Debate in Anthropology):

• Elman Service: Patrilocal bands (organized around related men) were the prototype because male cooperation was essential to hunting.
• M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies: Matrilocal bands (organized around related women) would be closer to the norm because gathering contributed more calories.
• In societies where hunting is the primary source of food, women tend to be subordinate to men.
• In societies that mainly gather plants for food, men and women tend to have roughly equal status.

Law in Band Societies

• Disputes are resolved informally.
• No formal mediators or courts of law.
• Duels are employed in some cultures.
  • Inuit: Disputants engage in song duels, with the audience selecting the winner.
• The Mbuti use ridicule.
  • Elders evaluate disputes and criticize individuals by name, using humor to soften criticism.

Warfare in Band Societies

• Conflict can break out into war, but it is usually sporadic and short-lived.
• Arises from interpersonal arguments.
  • Tiwi: Failure to reciprocate wife-giving led to abduction of women and violent talk.
  • Dobe !Kung: Homicide and violence mostly in disputes over women.

Tribal Political Organization

• Involves at least two well-defined groups linked together.
• Ranges in population from about 100 to as many as 5,000 people.
• Social institutions can be fairly complex.
• There are no centralized political structures or offices in the strict sense.
• There may be headmen, but there are no rules of succession.
• Tribal leadership roles are open to anyone—usually men, especially elder men because of their personal abilities and qualities.
• Leaders do not have a means of coercing others or formal powers associated with their positions; instead, they must persuade others to take actions they feel are needed.
  • A Yanomami headsman would never issue an order unless he knew it would be obeyed.
  • The headman Kaobawä exercised influence by example and by making suggestions and warning of consequences of taking or not taking an action.
• Like bands, tribes are egalitarian societies.
• Some individuals accumulate personal property, but not to the extent that other tribe members are deprived.
• Every (almost always male) person has the opportunity to become a headman or leader, and one’s leadership position can be situational.
  • One man may be a good mediator, another an exemplary warrior, and a third capable of leading a hunt or finding a more ideal area for cultivation or grazing herds.
• The Big man of New Guinea is an example illustrating this kind of leadership.
  • The term is derived from the languages of New Guinean tribes (literally meaning “man of influence”).
  • Big man is one who has acquired followers by doing favors they cannot possibly repay, such as settling their debts or providing bride-wealth.
  • He might also acquire as many wives as possible to create alliances with his wives’ families.
  • His wives could work to care for as many pigs as possible, for example, and in due course, he could sponsor a pig feast that would serve to put more tribe members in his debt and shame his rivals.
  • The followers, incapable of repaying the Big Man’s gifts, stand metaphorically as beggars to him.
• A big man does not have the power of a monarch.
  • His role is not hereditary.
    • His son must demonstrate his worth and acquire his own following—he must become a big man in his own right.
  • Furthermore, there usually are other big men in the village who are his potential rivals.
    • Another man who proves himself capable of acquiring a following can displace the existing big man.
  • Has no power to coerce—no army or police force.
    • He cannot prevent a follower from joining another big man, nor can he force the follower to pay any debt owed.
    • There is no New Guinean equivalent of a U.S. marshal.
  • Therefore, he can have his way only by diplomacy and persuasion—which do not always work.

Tribal Systems of Social Integration

• Tribal societies have much larger populations than bands, so they must have mechanisms for creating and maintaining connections between tribe members.
• Family ties are not sufficient to maintain solidarity in a large tribe.
• Systems that knit tribes together are based on family (kin) relationships, including various kinds of marriage and family lineage systems.
• There are also ways to foster tribal solidarity outside of family arrangements through systems that unite members of a tribe by age or gender.

Integration through Age Grades and Age Sets

• Tribes use sodalities to encourage solidarity between unrelated people.
• All societies are divided into age categories.
  • U.S. educational system: Children are matched to grades in school according to their age.
• Other cultures have complex age-based social structures.
  • Pastoralists in East Africa have age grades and age sets.
    • Age sets: Named categories to which men of a certain age are assigned at birth.
    • Age grades: Groups of men who are close to one another in age and share similar duties or responsibilities.
    • Men cycle through each age grade over their lifetimes.
    • As the age sets advance, the men assume the duties associated with each age grade.
  • Example: The Tiriki of Kenya.
    • From birth to about fifteen years of age, boys become members of one of seven named age sets.
    • When the last boy is recruited, that age set closes and a new one opens.
    • Example: Young and adult males who belonged to the “Juma” age set in 1939 became warriors by 1954.
    • The “Mayima” were already warriors in 1939 and became elder warriors during that period.
    • In precolonial times, men of the warrior age grade defended the herds of the Tiriki and conducted raids on other tribes.
    • Elder warriors acquired cattle and houses and took on wives.
    • There were recurring reports of husbands who were much older than their wives, who had married early in life, often as young as fifteen or sixteen.
    • Elder warriors also handled decision-making functions of the tribe as a whole; their legislation affected the entire village while also representing their own kin groups.
    • Other age sets also moved up through age grades in the fifteen-year period.
    • The elder warriors in 1939, “Nyonje,” became the judicial elders by 1954.
    • Their function was to resolve disputes that arose between individuals, families, and kin groups, of which some elders were a part.
    • The “Jiminigayi,” judicial elders in 1939, became ritual elders in 1954, handling supernatural functions that involved the entire Tiriki community.
    • During this period, the open age set was “Kabalach.”
    • Its prior members had all grown old or died by 1939, and new boys joined it between 1939 and 1954.
    • Thus, the Tiriki age sets moved in continuous 105-year cycles.
• Age-grade and age-set systems encourage bonds between men of similar ages.
• Their loyalty to their families is tempered by their responsibilities to their fellows of the same age.

Integration through Bachelor Associations and Men’s Houses

• Among most, if not all, tribes of New Guinea, the existence of men’s houses serves to cut across family lineage groups in a village.
• Perhaps the most fastidious case of male association in New Guinea is the bachelor association of the Mae-Enga, who live in the northern highlands.
• In their culture, a boy becomes conscious of the distance between males and females before he leaves home at age five to live in the men’s house.
• Women are regarded as potentially unclean, and strict codes that minimize male-female relations are enforced.
• Sanggai festivals reinforce this division.
• During the festival, every youth of age 15 or 16 goes into seclusion in the forest and observes additional restrictions, such as avoiding pigs (which are cared for by women) and avoiding gazing at the ground lest he see female footprints or pig feces.
• Every boy commits his loyalty to the men’s house early in life even though he remains a member of his birth family.
• Men’s houses are the center of male activities.
  • There, they draw up strategies for warfare, conduct ritual activities involving magic and honoring of ancestral spirits, and plan and rehearse periodic pig feasts.

Integration through Gifts and Feasting

• Exchanges and the informal obligations associated with them are primary devices by which bands and tribes maintain a degree of order and forestall armed conflict, which was viewed as the “state of nature” for tribal societies by Locke and Hobbes, in the absence of exercises of force by police or an army.
• Marcel Mauss attempted in 1925 to explain gift-giving and its attendant obligations cross-culturally in his book, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
• He started with the assumption that two groups have an imperative to establish a relationship of some kind.
  • There are three options when they meet for the first time.
    • They could pass each other by and never see each other again.
    • They may resort to arms with an uncertain outcome; one could wipe the other out or, more likely, win at great cost of men and property or fight to a draw.
    • The third option is to “come to terms” with each other by establishing a more or less permanent relationship.
• Exchanging gifts is one way for groups to establish this relationship.
• These gift exchanges are quite different from Western ideas about gifts.
• In societies that lack a central government, formal law enforcement powers, and collection agents, the gift exchanges are obligatory and have the force of law in the absence of law.
• Mauss referred to them as “total prestations.”
• Though no Dun and Bradstreet agents would come to collect, the potential for conflict that could break out at any time reinforced the obligations.
  • According to Mauss, the first obligation is to give; it must be met if a group is to extend social ties to others.
  • The second obligation is to receive; refusal of a gift constitutes rejection of the offer of friendship as well; conflicts can arise from the perceived insult of a rejected offer.
  • The third obligation is to repay; one who fails to make a gift in return will be seen as in debt—in essence, a beggar.
• Mauss offered several ethnographic cases that illustrated these obligations.
• Every gift conferred power to the giver, expressed by the Polynesian terms mana (an intangible supernatural force) and hau (among the Maori, the “spirit of the gift,” which must be returned to its owner).

Basics of Marriage, Family, and Kinship

• Understanding social solidarity in tribal societies requires knowledge of family structures, which are also known as kinship systems.
• The romantic view of marriage in today’s mass media is largely a product of Hollywood movies and romance novels from mass-market publishers such as Harlequin.
• In most cultures around the world, marriage is largely a device that links two families together; this is why arranged marriage is so common from a cross-cultural perspective.
• Marriage is defined in numerous ways, usually (but not always) involving a tie between a woman and a man; same-sex marriage is also common in many cultures.
• Nuclear families consist of parents and their children.
• Extended families consist of three generations or more of relatives connected by marriage and descent.
• Most rules of descent generally fall into one of two categories.
  • Bilateral descent (commonly used in the United States) recognizes both the mother’s and the father’s “sides” of the family while unilineal descent recognizes only one sex-based “side” of the family.
    • Unilineal descent can be patrilineal, recognizing only relatives through a line of male ancestors, or matrilineal, recognizing only relatives through a line of female ancestors.
• Groups made up of two or more extended families can be connected as larger groups linked by kinship ties.
• A lineage consists of individuals who can trace or demonstrate their descent through a line of males or females to the founding ancestor.

Integration Through Marriage

• Most tribal societies’ political organizations involve marriage, which is a logical vehicle for creating alliances between groups.
• One of the most well-documented types of marriage alliance is bilateral cross-cousin marriage in which a man marries his cross-cousin—one he is related to through two links, his father’s sister and his mother’s brother.
• These marriages have been documented among the Yanomami, an indigenous group living in Venezuela and Brazil.
  • Yanomami villages are typically populated by two or more extended family groups also known as lineages.
  • Disputes and disagreements are bound to occur, and these tensions can potentially escalate to open conflict or even physical violence.
  • Bilateral cross-cousin marriage provides a means of linking lineage groups together over time through the exchange of brides.
  • Because cross-cousin marriage links people together by both marriage and blood ties (kinship), these unions can reduce tension between the groups or at least provide an incentive for members of rival lineages to work together.

Integration Through a Segmentary Lineage

• Another type of kin-based integrative mechanism is a segmentary lineage.
• As previously noted, a lineage is a group of people who can trace or demonstrate their descent from a founding ancestor through a line of males or a line of females.
• A segmentary lineage is a hierarchy of lineages that contains both close and relatively distant family members.
• At the base are several minimal lineages whose members trace their descent from their founder back two or three generations.
• At the top is the founder of all of the lineages, and two or more maximal lineages can derive from the founder’s lineage.
• Between the maximal and the minimal lineages are several intermediate lineages.
• One characteristic of segmentary lineages is complementary opposition.
• The classic examples of segmentary lineages were described by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) in his discussion of the Nuer, pastoralists who lived in southern Sudan.
• Paul Bohannan (1989) also described this system among the Tiv, who were West African pastoralists, and Robert Murphy and Leonard Kasdan (1959) analyzed the importance of these lineages among the Bedouin of the Middle East.
• Segmentary lineages often develop in environments in which a tribal society is surrounded by several other tribal societies.
• Hostility between the tribes induces their members to retain ties with their kin and to mobilize them when external conflicts arise. An example of this is ties maintained between the Nuer and the Dinka.
• Once a conflict is over, segmentary lineages typically dissolve into their constituent units.
• Another attribute of segmentary lineages is local genealogical segmentation, meaning close lineages dwell near each other, providing a physical reminder of their genealogy.
• A Bedouin proverb summarizes the philosophy behind segmentary lineages:

I against my brother

I and my brother against my cousin

I, my brother, and my cousin against the world

• Segmentary lineages regulate both warfare and inheritance and property rights.
• As noted by Sahlins (1961) in studies of the Nuer, tribes in which such lineages occur typically have relatively large populations of close to 100,000 persons.

Law in Tribal Societies

• Tribal societies generally lack systems of codified law whereby damages, crimes, remedies, and punishments are specified.
• Only state-level political systems can determine, usually by writing formal laws, which behaviors are permissible and which are not (discussed later in this chapter).
• In tribes, there are no systems of law enforcement whereby an agency such as the police, the sheriff, or an army can enforce laws enacted by an appropriate authority.
• And, as already noted, headman and big men cannot force their will on others.
• In tribal societies, as in all societies, conflicts arise between individuals.
  • Sometimes the issues are equivalent to crimes—taking of property or commitment of violence—that are not considered legitimate in a given society.
  • Other issues are civil disagreements—questions of ownership, damage to property, an accidental death.
• In tribal societies, the aim is not so much to determine guilt or innocence or to assign criminal or civil responsibility as it is to resolve conflict, which can be accomplished in various ways.

Ways to Resolve Conflict:

• The parties might choose to avoid each other; bands, tribes, and kin groups often move away from each other geographically, which is much easier for them to do than for people living in complex societies.
• One issue in tribal societies, as in all societies, is guilt or innocence.
  • When no one witnesses an offense or an account is deemed unreliable, tribal societies sometimes rely on the supernatural.
    • Oaths, for example, involve calling on a deity to bear witness to the truth of what one says; the oath given in court is a holdover from this practice.
    • An ordeal is used to determine guilt or innocence by submitting the accused to dangerous, painful, or risky tests believed to be controlled by supernatural forces.
    • The poison oracle used by the Azande of the Sudan and the Congo is an ordeal based on their belief that most misfortunes are induced by witchcraft (in this case, witchcraft refers to ill feeling of one person toward another).
  • A more commonly exercised option is to find ways to resolve the dispute.
    • In small groups, an unresolved question can quickly escalate to violence and disrupt the group.
      • The first step is often negotiation; the parties attempt to resolve the conflict by direct discussion in hope of arriving at an agreement.
      • Offenders sometimes make a ritual apology, particularly if they are sensitive to community opinion.
        • In Fiji, for example, offenders make ceremonial apologies called i soro, one of the meanings of which is “I surrender.”
• When negotiation or a ritual apology fails, often the next step is to recruit a third party to mediate a settlement as there is no official who has the power to enforce a settlement.
  • A classic example in the anthropological literature is the Leopard Skin Chief among the Nuer, who is identified by a leopard skin wrap around his shoulders.
    • He is not a chief but is a mediator. The position is hereditary, has religious overtones, and is responsible for the social well-being of the tribal segment.
    • He typically is called on for serious matters such as murder.
    • The culprit immediately goes to the residence of the Leopard Skin Chief, who cuts the culprit’s arm until blood flows.
    • If the culprit fears vengeance by the dead man’s family, he remains at the residence, which is considered a sanctuary, and the Leopard Skin Chief then acts as a go-between for the families of the perpetrator and the dead man.
    • The Leopard Skin Chief cannot force the parties to settle and cannot enforce any settlement they reach.
    • The source of his influence is the desire for the parties to avoid a feud that could escalate into an ever-widening conflict involving kin descended from different ancestors.
    • He urges the aggrieved family to accept compensation, usually in the form of cattle.
    • When such an agreement is reached, the chief collects the 40 to 50 head of cattle and takes them to the dead man’s home, where he performs various sacrifices of cleansing and atonement.
  • This discussion demonstrates the preference most tribal societies have for mediation given the potentially serious consequences of a long-term feud.
• Even in societies organized as states, mediation is often preferred; in the agrarian town of Talea, Mexico, for example, even serious crimes are mediated in the interest of preserving a degree of local harmony.
• The national authorities often tolerate local settlements if they maintain the peace.

Warfare in Tribal Societies

• What happens if mediation fails and the Leopard Skin Chief cannot convince the aggrieved clan to accept cattle in place of their loved one? War.
• In tribal societies, wars vary in cause, intensity, and duration, but they tend to be less deadly than those run by states because of tribes’ relatively small populations and limited technologies.
• Tribes engage in warfare more often than bands, both internally and externally.
• Among pastoralists, both successful and attempted thefts of cattle frequently spark conflict.
• Among pre-state societies, pastoralists have a reputation for being the most prone to warfare.
• However, horticulturalists also engage in warfare, as the film Dead Birds, which describes warfare among the highland Dani of west New Guinea (Irian Jaya), attests.
• Among anthropologists, there is a “protein debate” regarding causes of warfare.
  • Marvin Harris in a 1974 study of the Yanomami claimed that warfare arose there because of a protein deficiency associated with a scarcity of game, and Kenneth Good supported that thesis in finding that the game a Yanomami villager brought in barely supported the village.
    • He could not link this variable to warfare, however.
  • In rebuttal, Napoleon Chagnon linked warfare among the Yanomami with abduction of women rather than disagreements over hunting territory, and findings from other cultures have tended to agree with Chagnon’s theory.
• Tribal wars vary in duration.
  • Raids are short-term uses of physical force that are organized and planned to achieve a limited objective such as acquisition of cattle (pastoralists) or other forms of wealth and, often, abduction of women, usually from neighboring communities.
  • Feuds are longer in duration and represent a state of recurring hostilities between families, lineages, or other kin groups.
    • In a feud, the responsibility to avenge rests with the entire group, and the murder of any kin member is considered appropriate because the kin group as a whole is considered responsible for the transgression.
    • Among the Dani, for example, vengeance is an obligation; spirits are said to dog the victim’s clan until its members murder someone from the perpetrator’s clan.

Ranked Societies and Chiefdoms

• Unlike egalitarian societies, ranked societies (sometimes called “rank societies”) involve greater differentiation between individuals and the kin groups to which they belong.
• These differences can be, and often are, inherited, but there are no significant restrictions in these societies on access to basic resources; all individuals can meet their basic needs.
• The most important differences between people of different ranks are based on sumptuary rules—norms that permit persons of higher rank to enjoy greater social status by wearing distinctive clothing, jewelry, and/or decorations denied those of lower rank.
• Every family group or lineage in the community is ranked in a hierarchy of prestige and power.
• Furthermore, within families, siblings are ranked by birth order, and villages can also be ranked.
• The concept of a ranked society leads us directly to the characteristics of chiefdoms.
• Unlike the position of headman in a band, the position of chief is an office—a permanent political status that demands a successor when the current chief dies. There are, therefore, two concepts of chief: the man (women rarely, if ever, occupy these posts) and the office; thus the expression “The king is dead, long live the king.”
• With the New Guinean big man, there is no formal succession; other big men will be recognized and eventually take the place of one who dies, but there is no rule stipulating that his eldest son or any son must succeed him.
• For chiefs, there must be a successor, and there are rules of succession.
• Political chiefdoms usually are accompanied by an economic exchange system known as redistribution in which goods and services flow from the population at large to the central authority represented by the chief.
• It then becomes the task of the chief to return the flow of goods in another form.
• These political and economic principles are exemplified by the potlatch custom of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other indigenous groups who lived in chiefdom societies along the northwest coast of North America from the extreme northwest tip of California through the coasts of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and southern Alaska.
  • Potlatch ceremonies observed major events such as births, deaths, marriages of important persons, and installment of a new chief.
  • Families prepared for the event by collecting food and other valuables such as fish, berries, blankets, animal skins, carved boxes, and copper.
  • At the potlatch, several ceremonies were held, dances were performed by their “owners,” and speeches delivered.
  • The new chief was watched very carefully; members of the society noted the eloquence of his speech, the grace of his presence, and any mistakes he made, however egregious or trivial.
  • Next came the distribution of gifts, and again the chief was observed; was he generous with his gifts? Was the value of his gifts appropriate to the rank of the recipient or did he give valuable presents to individuals of relatively low rank? Did his wealth allow him to offer valuable objects?
  • The next phase of the potlatch was critical to the chief’s validation of his position; visitor after visitor would arise and give long speeches evaluating the worthiness of this successor to the chieftainship of his father.
  • If his performance had so far met their expectations, if his gifts were appropriate, the guests’ speeches praised him accordingly; they were less than adulatory if the chief had not performed to their expectations, and they deemed the formal eligibility of the successor insufficient—he had to perform.
  • If he did, then the guests’ praise not only legitimized the new chief in his role, but also it ensured some measure of peace between villages; thus, in addition to being a festive event, the potlatch determined the successor’s legitimacy and served as a form of diplomacy between groups.
• Much has been made among anthropologists of rivalry potlatches in which competitive gifts were given by rival pretenders to the chieftainship.
• Philip Drucker argued that competitive potlatches were a product of sudden demographic changes among the indigenous groups on the northwest coast; when smallpox and other diseases decimated hundreds, many potential successors to the chieftainship died, leading to situations in which several potential successors might be eligible for the chieftainship; thus, competition in potlatch ceremonies became extreme with blankets or copper repaid with ever-larger piles and competitors who destroyed their own valuables to demonstrate their wealth.
• The events became so raucous that the Canadian government outlawed the displays in the early part of the twentieth century.
• Prior to that time, it had been sufficient for a successor who was chosen beforehand to present appropriate gifts.

Kin-Based Integrative Mechanisms: Conical Clans

• With the centralization of society, kinship is most likely to continue playing a role, albeit a new one.
• Among Northwest Coast Indians, for example, the ranking model has every lineage ranked, one above the other, siblings ranked in order of birth, and even villages in a ranking scale.
• Drucker points out that the further north one goes, the more rigid the ranking scheme is; the most northerly of these coastal peoples trace their descent matrilineally; indeed, the Haida consist of four clans; those further south tend to be patrilineal, and some show characteristics of an ambilineal descent group; it is still unclear, for example, whether the Kwakiutl numaym are patrilineal clans or ambilineal descent groups.
• In assuming patrilineal descent, the eldest male within a given lineage becomes the chief of his district, that is, Chief a in the area of Local Lineage A, which is the older intermediate lineage (Intermediate Lineage I) relative to the founding clan ancestor; Chief b is the oldest male in Local Lineage B, which, in turn, is the oldest intermediate lineage (again Intermediate Lineage I) relative to the founding clan ancestor; Chief c is the oldest male of local Lineage C descended from the second oldest intermediate lineage ( Intermediate Lineage II) relative to the founding clan ancestor, and Chief d is the oldest male of Local Lineage D, descended from the second oldest intermediate Lineage (Intermediate Lineage II) relative to the founding clan ancestor.
• Nor does this end the process; Chief a, as head of Local Lineage A, also heads the district of Intermediate Lineage I while Chief c heads Local Lineage C in the district of Intermediate lineage II; finally, the entire chiefdom is headed by the eldest male (Chief a) of the entire district governed by the descendants of the clan ancestor.

Integration through Marriage

• Because chiefdoms cannot enforce their power by controlling resources or by having a monopoly on the use of force, they rely on integrative mechanisms that cut across kinship groups.
• As with tribal societies, marriage provides chiefdoms with a framework for encouraging social cohesion.
• However, since chiefdoms have more-elaborate status hierarchies than tribes, marriages tend to reinforce ranks.
• A particular kind of marriage known as matrilateral cross-cousin demonstrates this effect.
• The figure shows three patrilineages (family lineage groups based on descent from a common male ancestor) that are labeled A, B, and C.
  • Consider the marriage between man B2 and woman a2; as you can see, they are linked by B1 (ego’s father) and his sister (a2), who is married to A1 and bears daughter a2; if you look at other partners, you will notice that all of the women move to the right: a2 and B2’s daughter, b3, will marry C3 and bear a daughter, c4.
• Viewed from the top of a flow diagram, the three lineages marry in a circle, and at least three lineages are needed for this arrangement to work; the Purum of India, for example, practiced matrilateral cross-cousin marriage among seven lineages.
• Lineage B cannot return the