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. 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 the accompanying diagram Figure 8. 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. Finally, the entire chiefdom is headed by the eldest male Chief a of the entire district governed by the descendants of the clan ancestor.
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. Poro and sande secret societies for men and women, respectively, are found in the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa, particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea.
Elsewhere, they are legal and membership is universally mandatory under local laws. They function in both political and religious sectors of society. So how can such societies be secret if all men and women must join? 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.
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. The chapter on economics provides additional information about redistribution economies. 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. 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? Visitor after visitor would arise and give long speeches evaluating the worthiness of this successor to the chieftainship of his father. 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. 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. 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. 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 the accompanying diagram Figure 4 , 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. Finally, the entire chiefdom is headed by the eldest male Chief a of the entire district governed by the descendants of the clan ancestor. 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 and is illustrated by the diagram in Figure 4. 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. 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. If A2 married b2, he would be marrying his patrilateral cross-cousin who is linked to him through A1, his sister a1, and her daughter b2. Therefore, b2 must marry C2 and lineage B can never repay lineage A for the loss of their daughters—trace their links to find out why.
B is a beggar relative to A. And lineage C is a beggar relative to lineage B. Paradoxically, lineage A which gives its daughters to B owes lineage C because it obtains its brides from lineage C.
In this system, there appears to be an equality of inequality. The patrilineal cross-cousin marriage system also operates in a complex society in highland Burma known as the Kachin. In that system, the wife-giving lineage is known as mayu and the wife-receiving lineage as dama to the lineage that gave it a wife.
Thus, in addition to other mechanisms of dominance, higher-ranked lineages maintain their superiority by giving daughters to lower-ranked lineages and reinforce the relations between social classes through the mayu-dama relationship. The Kachin are not alone in using interclass marriage to reinforce dominance. Unlike the Kachin, however, their marriage system was a way to upward mobility. Thus, if a Great Sun woman married a stinkard commoner , the child would become a Great Sun.
If a stinkard man were to marry a Great Sun woman, the child would be the same rank as the mother. The same relationship obtained between women of noble lineage and honored lineage and men of lower status.
Only two stinkard partners would maintain that stratum, which was continuously replenished with people in warfare. Other societies maintained status in different ways. This marriage system, which operated among many Middle Eastern nomadic societies, including the Rwala Bedouin chiefdoms, consolidated their herds, an important consideration for lineages wishing to maintain their wealth.
Poro and sande secret societies for men and women, respectively, are found in the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa, particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea. Elsewhere, they are legal and membership is universally mandatory under local laws. They function in both political and religious sectors of society.
So how can such societies be secret if all men and women must join? According to Beryl Bellman, who is a member of a poro association, the standard among the Kpelle of Liberia is an ability to keep secrets. Members of the community are entrusted with the political and religious responsibilities associated with the society only after they learn to keep secrets. They, like leopard skin chiefs, play an important role in mediation. The zo of both the poro and sande are held in great respect and even feared.
Some authors have suggested that sacred structure strengthens the secular political authority because chiefs and landowners occupy the most powerful positions in the zo. Opposite from egalitarian societies in the spectrum of social classes is the stratified society, which is defined as one in which elites who are a numerical minority control the strategic resources that sustain life.
Strategic resources include water for states that depend on irrigation agriculture, land in agricultural societies, and oil in industrial societies. Capital and products and resources used for further production are modes of production that rely on oil and other fossil fuels such as natural gas in industrial societies.
Current political movements call for the substitution of solar and wind power for fossil fuels. Operationally, stratification is, as the term implies, a social structure that involves two or more largely mutually exclusive populations.
An extreme example is the caste system of traditional Indian society, which draws its legitimacy from Hinduism. In caste systems , membership is determined by birth and remains fixed for life, and social mobility—moving from one social class to another—is not an option.
Nor can persons of different castes marry; that is, they are endogamous. Although efforts have been made to abolish castes since India achieved independence in , they still predominate in rural areas. The topmost varna caste is the Brahmin or priestly caste. It is composed of priests, governmental officials and bureaucrats at all levels, and other professionals. The next highest is the Kshatriya , the warrior caste, which includes soldiers and other military personnel and the police and their equivalents.
Metaphorically, they represent the parts of Manu , who is said to have given rise to the human race through dismemberment. The head corresponds to Brahmin , the arms to Kshatriya , the thighs to Vaishya , and the feet to the Sudra. There are also a variety of subcastes in India. The most important are the hundreds, if not thousands, of occupational subcastes known as jatis.
Wheelwrights, ironworkers, landed peasants, landless farmworkers, tailors of various types, and barbers all belong to different jatis. Like the broader castes, jatis are endogamous and one is born into them. They form the basis of the jajmani relationship, which involves the provider of a particular service, the jajman , and the recipient of the service, the kamin. Training is involved in these occupations but one cannot change vocations. Furthermore, the relationship between the jajman and the kamin is determined by previous generations.
In other words, you would be stuck with me regardless of how poor a barber I might be. This system represents another example of an economy as an instituted process, an economy embedded in society.
Under the worst restrictions, Dalits were thought to pollute other castes. If the shadow of a Dalit fell on a Brahmin , the Brahmin immediately went home to bathe. Thus, at various times and locations, the untouchables were also unseeable, able to come out only at night. Therefore, though soul class mobility is nonexistent during a lifetime, it is possible between lifetimes. Brahmins justified their station by claiming that they must have done good in their past lives.
However, there are indications that the untouchable Dalits and other lower castes are not convinced of their legitimation. In Japan, a caste known as Burakumin is similar in status to Dalit s. Though they are no different in physical appearance from other Japanese people, the Burakumin people have been forced to live in ghettos for centuries. They descend from people who worked in the leather tanning industry, a low-status occupation, and still work in leather industries such as shoemaking.
Marriage between Burakumin and other Japanese people is restricted, and their children are excluded from public schools. Some degree of social mobility characterizes all societies, but even so-called open-class societies are not as mobile as one might think.
In the United States, for example, actual movement up the social latter is rare despite Horatio Alger and rags-to-riches myths. In India a closed-class society , on the other hand, there are exceptions to the caste system. In Rajasthan, for example, those who own or control most of the land are not of the warrior caste as one might expect; they are of the lowest caste and their tenants and laborers are Brahmins.
The state is the most formal of the four levels of political organization under study here. In states, political power is centralized in a government that exercises a monopoly over the legitimate use of force. States develop in societies with large, often ethnically diverse populations—hundreds of thousands or more—and are characterized by complex economies that can be driven by command or by the market, social stratification, and an intensive agricultural or industrial base.
Several characteristics accompany a monopoly over use of legitimate force in a state. First, like tribes and chiefdoms, states occupy a more or less clearly defined territory or land defined by boundaries that separate it from other political entities that may or not be states exceptions are associated with the Islamic State and are addressed later.
Ancient Egypt was a state bounded on the west by desert and possibly forager or tribal nomadic peoples. Mesopotamia was a series of city-states competing for territory with other city-states. Heads of state can be individuals designated as kings, emperors, or monarchs under other names or can be democratically elected, in fact or in name—military dictators, for example, are often called presidents.
Usually, states establish some board or group of councilors e. Often, such councils are supplemented with one or two legislative assemblies. The Roman Empire had a senate which originated as a body of councilors and as many as four assemblies that combined patrician elite and plebian general population influences.
Congress during the Obama administration. Formally, the administrative offices are typically arranged in a hierarchy and the top offices delegate specific functions to lower ones.
Similar hierarchies are established for the personnel in a branch. In general, agricultural societies tend to rely on inter-personal relations in the administrative structure while industrial states rely on rational hierarchical structures. An additional state power is taxation—a system of redistribution in which all citizens are required to participate. This power is exercised in various ways.
A less tangible but no less powerful characteristic of states is their ideologies , which are designed to reinforce the right of powerholders to rule. Ideologies can manifest in philosophical forms, such as the divine right of kings in pre-industrial Europe, karma and the caste system in India, consent of the governed in the United States, and the metaphorical family in Imperial China.
More often, ideologies are less indirect and less perceptible as propaganda. We might watch the Super Bowl or follow the latest antics of the Kardashians, oblivious to the notion that both are diversions from the reality of power in this society. Young Americans, for example, may be drawn to military service to fight in Iraq by patriotic ideologies just as their parents or grandparents were drawn to service during the Vietnam War. Current examples include a lack of accountability for the killing of black men and women by police officers; the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, is a defining example.
Though state and nation are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. A state is a coercive political institution; a nation is an ethnic population. There currently are about states in the world, and many of them did not exist before World War II.
Meanwhile, there are around 5, nations identified by their language, territorial base, history, and political organization. Only recently has Japanese society opened its doors to immigrants, mostly from Korea and Taiwan. The vast majority of states in the world, including the United States, are multi-national. In the colonial era, the Mande-speaking peoples ranged across at least four West African countries, and borders between the countries were drawn without respect to the tribal identities of the people living there.
Diasporas, the scattering of a people of one ethnicity across the globe, are another classic example. The diaspora of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews is well-known. Many others, such as the Chinese, have more recently been forced to flee their homelands. The current ongoing mass migration of Syrians induced by formation of the Islamic State and the war in Syria is but the most recent example.
How do states form? One precondition is the presence of a stratified society in which an elite minority controls life-sustaining strategic resources. Another is increased agricultural productivity that provides support for a larger population. Neither, however, is a sufficient cause for development of a state.
A group of people who are dissatisfied with conditions in their home region has a motive to move elsewhere—unless there is nowhere else to go and they are circumscribed. Circumscription can arise when a region is hemmed in by a geographic feature such as mountain ranges or desert and when migrants would have to change their subsistence strategies, perhaps having to move from agriculture back to foraging, herding, or horticulture or to adapt to an urban industrialized environment.
The Inca Empire did not colonize on a massive scale beyond northern Chile to the south or into the Amazon because indigenous people there could simply pick up and move elsewhere. Still, the majority of the Inca population did not have that option. Circumscription also results when a desirable adjacent region is taken by other states or chiefdoms. Who, then, were the original subjects of these states? In his page tome Anthropology published in , Alfred L.
Thus, peasants had been defined in reference to some larger society, usually an empire, a state, or a civilization. In light of this, Wolf sought to place the definition of peasant on a structural footing.
They differ in that peasants live in states and primitive cultivators do not. Subjects of states are not necessarily landed; there is a long history of landless populations. Long before Portuguese, Spanish, and English seafarers began trading slaves from the west coast of Africa, Arab groups enslaved people from Africa and Europe. For peasants, proletarianization — loss of land—has been a continuous process. One example is landed gentry in eighteenth century England who found that sheepherding was more profitable than tribute from peasants and removed the peasants from the land.
At the level of the state, the law becomes an increasingly formal process. Procedures are more and more regularly defined, and categories of breaches in civil and criminal law emerge, together with remedies for those breaches. Early agricultural states formalized legal rules and punishments through codes, formal courts, police forces, and legal specialists such as lawyers and judges. Decisions could be appealed to a higher authority, but any final decision must be accepted by all concerned.
The first known system of codified law was enacted under the warrior king Hammurabi in Babylon present day Iraq. This law was based on standardized procedures for dealing with civil and criminal offenses, and subsequent decisions were based on precedents previous decisions. Crimes became offenses not only against other parties but also against the state. Other states developed similar codes of law, including China, Southeast Asia, and state-level Aztec and Inca societies.
Two interpretations, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, have arisen about the political function of codified systems of law.
Fried argued, based on his analysis of the Hammurabi codes, that such laws reinforced a system of inequality by protecting the rights of an elite class and keeping peasants subordinates. Another interpretation is that maintenance of social and political order is crucial for agricultural states since any disruption in the state would lead to neglect of agricultural production that would be deleterious to all members of the state regardless of their social status.
Civil laws ensure, at least in theory, that all disputing parties receive a hearing—so long as high legal expenses and bureaucratic logjams do not cancel out the process. Criminal laws, again in theory, ensure the protection of all citizens from offenses ranging from theft to homicide. Inevitably, laws fail to achieve their aims.
The United States, for example, has one of the highest crime rates in the industrial world despite having an extensive criminal legal system. The number of homicides in New York City in exceeded the number of deaths from colon and breast cancer and all accidents combined.
Nationwide, there currently are more than one million prisoners in state and federal correctional institutions, one of the highest national rates in the industrial world. Warfare occurs in all human societies but at no other level of political organization is it as widespread as in states. Indeed, warfare was integral to the formation of the agricultural state.
As governing elites accumulated more resources, warfare became a major means of increasing their surpluses. A further shift came with the advent of industrial society when industrial technologies driven by fossil fuels allowed states to invade distant countries.
A primary motivation for these wars was to establish economic and political hegemony over foreign populations. World War I, World War II, and lesser wars of the past century have driven various countries to develop ever more sophisticated and deadly technologies, including wireless communication devices for remote warfare, tanks, stealth aircraft, nuclear weapons, and unmanned aircraft called drones, which have been used in conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Competition among nations has led to the emergence of the United States as the most militarily powerful nation in the world. The expansion of warfare by societies organized as states has not come without cost. Every nation-state has involved civilians in its military adventures, and almost everyone has been involved in those wars in some way—if not as militarily, then as member of the civilian workforce in military industries.
World War II created an unprecedented armament industry in the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan, among others, and the aerospace industry underwent expansion in the so-called Cold War that followed.
Today, one can scarcely overlook the role of the process of globalization to explain how the United States, for now an empire, has influenced the peoples of other countries in the world. It should be noted that states have a clear tendency toward instability despite trappings designed to induce awe in the wider population.
Few states have lasted a thousand years. The American state is more than years old but increases in extreme wealth and poverty, escalating budget and trade deficits, a war initiated under false pretenses, escalating social problems, and a highly controversial presidential election suggest growing instability. Why states decline is not difficult to fathom. Yet, until recently following the election of Donald Trump , no one in the United States was taking to the streets calling for the president to resign or decrying the government as illegitimate.
In something of a paradox, widespread animosity does not necessarily lead to dissolution of a state or to an overthrow of the elite. Despite the fact that jobs have been shipped abroad, that once-vibrant cities like Wichita are virtual ghost towns, and that both congress and the state legislature have voted against social programs time and again, Kansans continued to vote the Republicans whose policies are responsible for these conditions into office.
Nor is this confined to Kansas or the United States. That slaves tolerated slavery for hundreds of years despite periodic revolts such as the one under Nat Turner in , that workers tolerated extreme conditions in factories and mines long before unionization, that there was no peasant revolt strong enough to reverse the enclosures in England—all demand an explanation.
Frank discusses reinforcing variables, such as propaganda by televangelists and Rush Limbaugh but offers little explanation beside them. Days before Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 8, , sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild released a book that partially explains how Trump appealed to the most marginalized populations of the United States, residents around Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana. In the book, Strangers in Their Own Land , Hochschild contends that the predominantly white residents there saw the federal government providing preferential treatment for blacks, women, and other marginalized populations under affirmative action programs while putting white working-class individuals further back in line for governmental assistance.
States elsewhere and the stratified societies that sustain them have undergone significant changes and, in some instances, dramatic transformations in recent years. Other states have failed; Somalia has all but dissolved and is beset by piracy, Yemen is highly unstable due in part to the Saudi invasion, and Syria has been decimated by conflict between the Bashar Assad government and a variety of rebel groups from moderate reform movements to extremist jihadi groups, al-Nusra and ISIS.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh has been unable to enforce safety regulations to foreign investors as witnessed by the collapse of a clothing factory in that took the lives of more than 1, workers. Citing both state and stateless societies, this chapter has examined levels of socio-cultural integration, types of social class from none to stratified , and mechanisms of social control exercised in various forms of political organization from foragers to large, fully developed states.
The chapter offers explanations for these patterns, and additional theories are provided by the works in the bibliography. Still, there are many more questions than answers. Why does socio-economic inequality arise in the first place?
How do states reinforce or generate inequality? Societies that have not developed a state have lasted far longer—about , to , years longer—than societies that became states. Will states persist despite the demonstrable disadvantages they present for the majority of their citizens?
In large communities, it can be difficult for people to feel a sense of connection or loyalty to people outside their immediate families. Choose one of the social-integration techniques used in tribes and chiefdoms and explain why it can successfully encourage solidarity between people. Can you identify similar systems for encouraging social integration in your own community? Although state societies are efficient in organizing people and resources, they also are associated with many disadvantages, such as extreme disparities in wealth, use of force to keep people in line, and harsh laws.
Given these difficulties, why do you think the state has survived? Do you think human populations can develop alternative political organizations in the future? Why is it important to understand whether ISIS is or is not likely to become a state? Affinal : family relationships created through marriage. Age grades: groups of men who are close to one another in age and share similar duties or responsibilities. Age sets: named categories to which men of a certain age are assigned at birth. Band : the smallest unit of political organization, consisting of only a few families and no formal leadership positions.
Big man: a form of temporary or situational leadership; influence results from acquiring followers. Chiefdom : large political units in which the chief, who usually is determined by heredity, holds a formal position of power. Circumscription: the enclosure of an area by a geographic feature such as mountain ranges or desert or by the boundaries of a state. Codified law: formal legal systems in which damages, crimes, remedies, and punishments are specified.
Core industrial nations seem to have more of an ideal open class system. Caste is a form of social stratification characterized by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a lifestyle which often includes an occupation, status in a hierarchy and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultural notions of superiority.
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