26 Types of Political Organization

Dr. Abhijeeta Das

CONTENTS

Learning Outcomes

1. Introduction
2. Historical Background of Political Organization
3. Types and Trends of Political Organization
4. Four types of Political Organization
5. Social Status in Chiefdoms
6. The Swazi State and the Ashanti State
7. Stateless political organizations
8. Summary

Learning Outcomes

After studying this module:

• You would be able to know the historical background of Political Organization.
• You shall be able to learn the types and trends of Political Organization.
• You would be able to identify the four types of Political Organization i.e. Band, Tribe, Chiefdoms and State.
• In addition to all these cited above, you would also understand the social status in chiefdoms the Swazi State, the Ashanti State and Stateless Political Organization.

1. Introduction 

There could be no coherent social life unless the social relationships which bind people together were at least to some degree orderly, institutionalized and predictable. The only alternative to order is chaos. To maintain an orderly system of social relations people have to be subjected to some degree of compulsion; they cannot, all the time, do exactly as they like. For often self-interest may incite behaviour incompatible with the common good, and so it is that in every society some rules, some kinds of constraint on people’s behaviour are acknowledged and, on the whole, adhered to. These rules and the means by which they are enforced differ greatly from society to society, but they always more or less effectively secure some degree of social order. So a social anthropologist who wishes to understand how a particular community works must ask what are the norms, the rules, which on the whole sustain social order, what is their range and scope, and how are they enforced?

Usually, though not invariably, the political unit can be defined territorially. So when we speak of a political system or a political organization we are usually referring to certain kinds of social relationships within a particular area, and this territorial reference is generally taken to be an important part of the definition of a political unit. When, on the other hand, we speak of ‘law’ and ‘social’ sanctions’ we are thinking primarily of the behaviour of individual people and of the relationships between them, and of the social factors which, by and large, ensure their conformity to the accepted rules of the society. So the difference between the two fields is mainly one of emphasis: political institutions must have a legal or sanctioning aspect, just as some rules of interpersonal behaviour and some social norms have political implications.

Power is the ability to exercise one’s will over others; authority is the socially approved use of power (Cheater, ed.1999; Gledhill 2000; Kurtz 2001; Wolf with Silverman 2001).

Political organization comprises those portions of social organization that specifically relate to the individuals or groups that manage the affairs of public policy or seek to control the appointment of activities of those individuals or groups. (Fried 1967, pp.20-21)

2. Historical Background of political organization

The history of political thought One must, in such a history, go back to Aristotle and Plato. In Aristotle’s politics, the first book is given over to a detailed description of the unwritten constitutions of several of the Greek city states. The descriptions are brief, but they are nevertheless competent by modern standards. Aristotle have described about the authority structure and the power structure as if the two do not coincide. Then, in the subsequent books of his politics, Aristotle leaves the factual and goes into the equally fascinating 

and important-but certainly different-topic of justice, and what political organization ought to be. Until very recently nobody looked at the factual part of Aristotle’s work, but merely the ethical and moral part of it-what the state ought to include. Indeed, the Oxford University Press’s Standard English edition even omits the empirical data. Plato was, on the other hand, perhaps the first to disregard the data that Aristotle was the first to use. In a long essay called The Republic, which became a sort of guide for the political philosophy of future generations, he said that a state should include 5040 people, and he set forth what each of them ought to do. Plato said little or nothing about the actual conditions of his time; neither did most of his followers.

The Platonic tradition, backed by the nonfactual half of Aristotle, became the tradition of the west. Nobody investigated politics; they merely talked about what states ought to do. In the days when the social idiom was a theological one, St. Augustine wrote a political tract called The city of God. In renaissance Italy, Machiavelli wrote a handbook for ambitious politicians called The prince, which takes a very realistic view of the situation, but does not report or analyze conditions-rather, it merely provides advice on how to manipulate them. A few centuries later Thomas Hobbes perpetrated his notion of the state in analogy to an organism made up of all the people who are its members. He called it the Leviathan-it is an image, as we have seen, still haunts our thinking about social and political problems. He and Rousseau postulated the social contract-in the beginning, they said, men realized intellectually that they would be better off if they banded together and so they made a contract to live socially. Obviously, we no longer believe that the socialization or domestication of man was quite as intellectual and purposeful as that. “Social contract” is a mistaken analysis of political legitimacy in terms of contract.

It was a French contemporary of Rousseau in the middle of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu in a book called The Spirit of the Laws, who laid the foundations for what is today the discipline of comparative politics. But a couple of centuries passed before Montesquieu’s ideas became dominant. He was a student of Roman law and history, and he took what we would today consider a scholarly, detached, curious view of them. During the nineteenth century, Montesqieu was for the most part either ignored or forgotten, because he did not ask questions congenial to that time. The difficulty lay in the fact that the genetic method, which released the biological sciences from alchemy, merely bound the social sciences the harder to popular superstition and a narrow reading of ancient history. The nineteenth century sought the origin was to understand them. Thus, political inquiry took the form of the question, “What is the origin of the state?”

Today we know that we cannot answer questions about the “origin” of the state because the factual evidence is buried deep in the unrecorded past. Even with the best of archeology, it is doubtful that ideas of such subtlety and magnitude can ever be recaptured unless they are written down or unless they survive in the oral traditions of people.

The question of origins was crystallized in the late nineteenth century in an argument concerning the “conquest origin of the state”. It was congenial to that century, which had already discovered the principle of survival of the fittest leading to evolution and biological change, to believe that the state resulted “automatically” when certain conditions of conquest and resulting rule of one people by another were met. Herbert Spencer, the British jack-of-all-philosophies, postulated that the state originated when two people came into conflict with each other and one of them was strong enough to subjugate the other. In order to keep the conquered people subjugated, the conquerors had to form a social organization of the sort that is today we called a state.

Whether this set of ideas is true or not-whether or not the state actually originated in this way-is not knowledgeable. We can say that in some instances actual states have been formed in this way-some of these states were African, others were European-but we can also cite examples in which existing states were not so formed, and many examples in which such conquest did not lead to the formation of a state. Actually, Spencer and his followers were stating a functional hypothesis in historical terms: one of the state’s function is to control force and power. This does not necessarily mean that it originated by controlling force and such is the assumption of the conquest theory.

Anthropologists have been investigating the political systems of primitive people since the turn of the present century. However, at first they did so with such instruments as the conquest theory, or with the difficult European concept of “sovereignty” that had evolved out of peculiar European traditions, or with the “ought” theories of the earlier philosophers. The difficulty that they had in freeing themselves from these dead concepts, and the valiancy with which they fought them, is one of the most rewarding reasons for reading the early anthropologists on comparative politics.

It was not until the late 1930s that the birth of the new comparative politics was brought to light, although excellent descriptions date from much earlier. In African political Systems, social scientists reached the first important goal in the processes of freeing themselves from preconceived notions of their own polity and from the tyranny of their own language. What the authors of this book did was extremely simple. They stated the thesis that it is possible to have a stable, enduring political system, working efficiently without the organization known as “the state”. Political order and the state are, in short, not synonymous.

Let it be insisted that it had long been known that some societies had organizations such as the state and others had not. The fact had, before this time, either been largely ignored, or the data had been squeezed into models derived from Western and classical notions of “the state”. With this book, it became easy to note that some societies have states and some do not, but that in all societies the functions of political organization are performed. It became, indeed, obvious that we must separate the political requirements that must be performed in every society from any specific set of social institutions by which they are performed. Like so many of the difficult discoveries of social science, the point is “obvious”.

African political Systems did more. It claimed that in Africa there were at least three sorts of organization that performed the political functions. Several distinctions could be made. First three were those societies that had states. There were, as a residual category, those other societies that did not have states: they were “stateless societies”. Logically, there is no reason to assume that all of the members of a residual category have any positive characteristic in common. It is, thus, necessary to search for principles or social forms in the residual category by means of which the functions are carried out.

It is just here that the first inadequacies in African Political Systems appear. The editors divided their stateless societies into those in which the political functions were taken care of by the extended family, and those in which the political functions were based on the clan or lineage. Actually, it is today possible to see that they left out a step in their analysis, because their data were not adequate. Since they wrote, we have discovered societies in Africa that do not have a state, but also do not regulate power in law or warfare by means either of extended families or of lineages. Therefore, another step can be added: stateless societies may be divided into those that control their political organization by means of kinship groups and those that do not that is, those that control it by means of non kinship groups. We can, then, divide the “kinship-groups” class into those utilizing extended families and those using descent groups for political purposes. In chart form, the organization of the types, made by a constant depletion of the residual category.

3. Types and Trends of Political Organization

Decades ago, the anthropologist Elman Service (1962) listed four types, or levels, of political organization as depicted in the figure:

Today, none of these political entities (polities) can be studied as a self-contained form of political organization, since all exist within nation-states and are subject to state control.

4.      Four types of Political Organization I. Bands

Bands have been found primarily among foragers, especially self sufficient pedestrian foragers. The total number of people within these societies rarely exceeds a few dozen. Bands are essentially associations of families living together. They are loosely allied by marriage, descent, friendship, and common interest. The primary integrating mechanism for these societies is kinship. Bands are extremely egalitarian– all families are essentially equal. There is no economic class differentiation. However, there are often clear status differences based on gender and age.

There is a horizontal status and power relationship in bands between all adults of the same gender. They are more or less equal as far as community decision making is concerned. However, some individuals in a band stand out for their skills and knowledge. These often are the people who have the best memories, are the best hunters, most successful curers, most gifted speakers, or have some other special ability. Such people become informal leaders. Most often they are given authority by community consensus arrived at through casual discussion without the need for a formal vote. This is possible because the entire society is small and everyone knows everyone else intimately as a result of living and working together throughout their lives. Band leaders generally have temporary political power at best, and they do not have any significant authority relative to other adults. They can give advice and propose action, but they do not have the formal authority to force others to accept their decisions.

The principle goal of politics in most bands is making sure that people get along with each other. This is not easy given human nature. There is always the potential for social disruption brought about by individuals failing to share food, sexual competition for the same mate, or other personal conflicts. Given the small size of bands and the fact that everyone is involved in the lives of everyone else, quarrels quickly become community problems that have the potential for splitting the band along family lines. In fact, band fissioning apparently has been a common occurrence. As the number of people in a society increases, the potential for disruptive interpersonal conflicts inevitably rises. Subsequently, the likelihood of families deciding to leave and form their own bands increases. Richard Lee has referred to this process as social velocity. He observed that among the ju/hoansi of southwest Africa, fissioning often occurred before a community reached the full carrying capacity of the environment. In other words, it was not food scarcity but, rather, social discord that was the cause of the break-up.

Typically, there is no leadership position in bands that has the authority to conclusively settle disputes, punish criminals, prevent families from leaving, or represent the entire community in dealings with outsiders. Decisions are made by community consensus, but people who don’t agree with the consensus generally do not have to accept it. During the late 19th century, this highly democratic diffused political system of bands made it difficult for the U.S. government to create binding treaties with some Native American societies in the West. It was naively assumed by the federal government that when “spokesmen” for a band agreed to a treaty that it legally bound all members of their society to its terms. From the perspective of the band members, it really only obligated those specific individuals who agreed to the treaty. If others in the band failed to follow the terms of the agreement, the federal government assumed that they were going back on a legal agreement. This cultural misunderstanding on both sides was the consequence of having radically different kinds of political systems as well as profound ethnocentrism.

Ethnographic accounts suggest that the political power and status of women in many pedestrian foraging bands was surprisingly high, especially compared to pastoralist and agricultural societies. Since forager women in all but the cold polar regions usually provided most of the food calories consumed, they performed economically critical roles for their families and society as a whole. Men generally hunted for meat. This was often the most desirable but usually the least dependable food source. The central economic role for women in providing vegetarian foods, along with traditions of diffused political power in bands, allowed women to voice their opinions at important community meetings. Clearly, women in some types of foraging societies had significantly less political clout. The status and authority of women in aquatic and equestrian foraging societies was usually far lower than that of men. This may be due to the fact that men generally provided most of the food in these societies that depended on meat as their principal source of calories. In addition, the passionate military focus of equestrian foraging societies put men in a position to dominate political decision making.

No band level societies survive today with their traditional form of political organization intact. However, they did until the last half of the 19th century in far-flung regions of northern Siberia, the desert and sub-arctic regions of North America and Greenland, the tropical lowlands of Central and South America, the Australian desert interior and tropical north, as well as a few isolated areas of Southeast Asia. While it is easy to think of these people and their traditional way of life in the past as oddities, it is important to keep in mind that the distant ancestors of all people on earth lived in bands at one time. Before the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago, it is likely that very few societies had more complex levels of political integration.

ii. Tribe

A tribe is a somewhat more complex type of acephalous society than a band. As the population size increases with a shift in subsistence pattern from foraging to horticulture or pastoralism, it eventually reaches a point at which kinship ties and friendship are no longer sufficient to hold society together. This is especially the case when there are hundreds of people and multiple communities. Tribes are also are characteristic of some large equestrian and rich aquatic foraging societies. Regardless of the subsistence based and new forms of societal integration become a necessity in tribes to settle disputes and prevent the society from disintegrating.

The new integrative mechanisms of tribes are referred to by anthropologists as pan tribal associations or sodalities. These are groups that cut across the society by bringing together a limited number of people, typically at least one from each family. Pan tribal associations often are in the form of councils, groups of elder men or women who are members of the same age set warrior societies, religious cults, or secret societies. While these groups have specific purposes, they also serve to create order and a sense of unity for a tribe.

In a number of tribal societies of New Guinea, all men traditionally lived together communally in a “big house”, while women lived with their daughters and young sons in their own individual houses close to the gardens where they farmed. Older boys went through an initiation ceremony in order to become a man move into the “big house”, and learn the religious secrets kept by men. In these societies, men made the important political decisions. The group of men living in the big houses acted as the pan tribal association that cross-cut the society. Even in New Guinea societies that did not have a tradition of “big houses”, the important pan tribal associations were most often made up of men as they are in most tribal societies. Subsequently, men had more political power and prestige than women.

Tribes commonly have village headmen who perform leadership roles, but these individuals have relatively limited authority. Political power stems largely from their senior position within kin groups and their ability to persuade or harangue others into doing what they want. In New Guinea and many of the neighboring islands of Melanesia, these leaders are called “big men”. In the past, there often were competing “big men” who vied with each other for status and nominal authority over a number of villages. They worked for years to accumulate pigs and other items of high value in order to give them away in large, very public formal ceremonies. This functioned to not only enhance their status and political influence but to also redistribute wealth within their societies. A similar ritualized economic redistribution was orchestrated by the leading men among the Kwakiutl and some other rich fishing societies on the northwest coast of North America. Their principle goal was also to increase their status and power.

Like bands, most tribal societies are still essentially egalitarian, where in no one family or residential group is politically or economically superior to others. All families are basically alike, including those of the headmen. They are for the most part self-sufficient with regard to food and other basic necessities. However, tribes differ from bands in the way that they are integrated. They are also larger societies. Tribal societies have suffered the same consequence of contact with the large-scale societies. There are no longer any tribes that have been able to maintain their traditional political systems unaltered by outside influences.

iii. Chiefdom

The first chiefdom developed perhaps a thousand years earlier, but few survive today. In many parts of the world the chiefdom was a transitional form of organization that emerged during the evolution of tribes into states.

Much of our ethnographic knowledge about chiefdoms came from Polynesia (Kirch 2000), where they were common at the time of European exploration. In chiefdoms, social relations are mainly based on kinship, marriage, descent, age, generation, and gender – as they are in bands and tribes.

Unlike bands and tribes, however, chiefdoms are characterized by permanent political regulation of the territory they administer. Chiefdoms might include thousands of people living in many villages and or hamlets. Regulation was carried out by the chief and his or her assistants, who occupied political offices. An office is a permanent position, which must be refilled when it is vacated by death or retirement. Because offices were systematically refilled, the structure of chiefdom endured across generations, ensuring permanent political regulation.

In the Polynesian chiefdoms, the chiefs were full-time political specialists in charge of regulating the economy-production, distribution, and consumption. Polynesian chiefs relied on religion to buttress their authority. They regulated production by commanding or prohibiting (using religious taboos) the cultivation of certain lands and crops. Chiefs also regulated distribution and consumption. At certain seasons-often on a ritual occasion such as a first-fruit ceremony-people would offer part of their harvest to the chief through his or her representatives. Products moved up the hierarchy, eventually reaching the chief. Conversely, illustrating obligatory sharing with kin, chiefs sponsored feasts at which they gave back much of what they had received.

Such a flow of resources to and then from a central office is known as chiefly redistribution. Redistribution offers economic advantages. If the different areas specialized in particular crops, goods, or services, chiefly redistribution made those products available to the whole society. Chiefly redistribution also played a role in disaster management. It stimulated production beyond the immediate subsistence level and provided a central storehouse for goods that might become scarce at times of famine (Earle 1987, 1991). Chiefdoms and archaic states had similar economies, often based on intensive cultivation, and both administered systems of regional trade or exchange.

5. Social Status in Chiefdoms

Social status in chiefdoms was based on seniority of descent. Because rank, power, prestige, and resources came through kinship and descent, Polynesian chiefs kept extremely long genealogies. Some chiefs (without writing) managed to trace their ancestry back 50 generations. All the people in the chiefdom were thought to be related to each other. Presumably, all were descended from a group of founding ancestors.

The chief (usually a man) had to demonstrate seniority in descent. Degrees of seniority were calculated so intricately on some islands that there were as many ranks as people. For example, the third son would rank below the second, who in turn would rank below the first. The children of an eldest brother, however, would all rank above the children of the next brother, whose children would in turn outrank those of younger brothers. However, even the lowest-ranking person in a chiefdom was still the chief’s relative. In such a kin-based context, everyone, even a chief, had to share with his or her relatives. Because everyone had a slightly different status, it was difficult to draw a line between elites and common people. Although other chiefdoms calculated seniority differently and had shorter genealogies than did those in Polynesia, the concern for genealogy and seniority and the absence of sharp gaps between elites and commoners were features of all chiefdoms.

TABLE No.1 Economic Basis of and Political Regulation in Bands, Tribes, Chiefdoms and States.

 iv. The State

A state is a formal organization role in which legal and military authority is vested and in which such authority is considered by the members of the state to be its primary purpose. The state is a special social group charged with allocating authority to use physical force in order to achieve peace and conformance with law and custom on the one hand, and to maintain territorial and cultural integrity against external threats on the other.

A state is a group of people with a purpose. They have an organization: a formal concatenation of roles and offices. They have a material and ideal culture with which to carry out the purpose, to evaluate it, and to criticize it. The officers of the state have authority to use force in order to carry their purpose. In the first examples, it will be assumed that they also have the power to use it; there are, however, many situations in which the power system is actually different from the authority system.

The mode of organization of the state varies widely. It may be patterned on analogy to family and household structure- a very different matter from actually utilizing the family and household structures to perform the political functions. The Swazi provide an excellent example of people who organize their political life in analogy to their family organization. Among the Ashanti, on the other hand, the army provides the fundamental folk model for the organization of the state. Other examples are to be found in the Council of Forty-four among the Cheyenne Indians and the religious organizations of some of the Polynesian states, both of which cast their state organizations into religious idiom. Finally, there is, as in Western Europe and the states that derive from there, an organization specifically established to handle governmental or political functions. The modern national state is a huge network of organizations, each of which not merely serves a given purpose, but was in fact established for a given purpose within government. It does not, as a rule, make much use of organizations that are already existent and serving other purposes.

6.  THE SWAZI STATE

The first of the African states to be described is the Swazi state enclaved within the Republic of South Africa. The Swazi are a large tribe who are not a part of South Africa, but are one of the two so-called “High Commission Territories” and come directly under the Colonial Secretary in Her Majesty’s government. The present-day lives of Swazi are more or less dominated by South Africa, and they are economically a part of South Africa and subject to much of the same sort of economic pressures to leave their tribal areas and go out to work in order to earn money.

The Swazis have a king-the present king, named Sobhuza, is a college graduate, who when the Swazi were studied in the late 1930s, still performed most of the traditional ceremonies his kingship imposed on him. In order to understand his kingdom, we shall investigate the territorial organization of the Swazi people, and something about their legal and military activities. (Kuper 1947).

Swazi homesteads lie scattered at irregular intervals over the hilly countryside, and contain from seven to twenty-five or more people. The plot plan of the homestead is standardized and had three key points. The first is the cattle byre, which is the central point in the homestead, where cattle are kept when they are not in pasture, and which represents symbolically the compound head. Then, there is the “great hut”, which is described as typically the quarters of the mother of the compound head, but the mother may be replaced after her death by senior wife. Finally, there are the “bachelors’ quarters” at the outlying areas.

The great hut is the religious centre of the compound, containing the religious symbols and the altar. The “mother” or her substitute is the link between the compound head and his ancestors. The byre is the economic centre of the household and it is also the centre of authority. The bachelors’ huts, for unmarried men and male visitors, are located at the entrance of the homestead, and the men who live there are in-charged with protecting the homestead from outsiders. Between the bachelors’ huts and the great hut, forming an arc around the byre, are the huts of the wives and dependents of the homestead head. The compound may be spread out spatially, for Swazi consider it advisable to give co-wives plenty of room to avoid one another if they want to do so.

The domestic authority within the compound is very specifically set out. The compound head is nominally in full authority, but he is very effectively checked by the authority exercised by the headwoman. She plays a definite part in the ceremonies and sacrifices performed for the ancestors, and are the mediator of all the women’s activities and all of the women’s disputes in the household.

When a headman dies, his main heir must perpetuate the homestead. He must place a wife at each of the local subdivisions of the compound, “to wake the huts of his father so that they will not perish”. He takes his father’s place; his wives take up places in space beside his father’s wives.

The homestead of the king is organized in accordance with the same principles as those governing the homesteads of other important polyginists. But the homestead of the king covers not merely a space the size of a small village. Rather, the entire country is his homestead. There are two “capitals” in Swaziland: one is the king’s home, and it is called “the byre” of the nation. The other, about twenty-five miles away, is the centre of the queen mother and is called “the great hut”. The whole nation is composed of their metaphorical family and dependents. The queen mother exercise the same sort of restraining power over the king as the head woman of a compound exercise over a compound head man. The government cannot function unless there is rapport between the two; together they must carry out the rituals of the cult of the royal ancestors in the national religion.

There are also several “bachelor quarters” or ‘” barracks” throughout the kingdom. In these, too, the king places members of his family. They serve as information centers-provincial capitals, as it were-and in the old days as army posts. In addition, the king sends part of his queens or other dependents to “wake the huts” in the capitals of his predecessors.

The whole authority system radiates from the king. Aristocrats are graded by proximity of relationship to the ruling line of the royal clan. The kings’ close relatives, particularly his uncles and half brothers, wield great influence. These senior princes are consulted on all important issues. They, together with other counselors, are the kings’ advisers and teachers, as well as his most fearless critics. In order to avoid trouble between the king and the princes who were passed over in the inheritance, the eldest sons of most of the senior queens receive principalities as birthrights. The queens of the dead king are distributed at royal centres throughout the country; their sons become princes over the surrounding people. The position of prince in the outlying principality is usually heritable at least for several generations.

However, the king is careful not to allow too much power to his male kinsmen, and certain high posts to be monopolized by commoners. These commoners are extremely important, for they link the commoner clans directly to the royal clans by links of patronage vaguely similar to those found in the European feudal past. These commoners hear court cases and give judgement, thus forming the body of judges. They look after the royal herds, organize labor, and do most of the important management jobs of running the kingdom. They can also remind remiss king or queen mother of their duties. The two councils of these commoner office holders can make laws to hold the power of the king to the constitutional prerogatives of his authority.

Swazi military strength also centres on the king. Swazi men form age-set organizations of a sort that are usually called “regiments”. They are organized by neighbourhoods, and at certain times during their youth, the men spend several months or several years at the various “barracks”, or capitals of the king, on “active duty”. They provide a fighting force in war time and a labor force in peace time. Their allegiance is directly to the king; their officers form a council, separate from the civil councils.

The Swazi, then, see their territory organized in an analogy to the king’s homestead. It is not merely the royal family writ large, however, because it has a well-defined organization made up of royal family, on the one hand, and commoner officials and councils representing specific clans. Law is administered through a civil council; warfare is taken care of by military council. The king is the chief link between the two. Every man owes his king military service during his youth. The Swazi state is, except for the idioms of the family in which it is viewed, not so very different from our own state.

THE ASHANTI STATE

In the additional polity of the Ashanti of present-day Ghana, the idiom of the state was quite different: it was a military one, with the army providing the most important images. The Ashanti are a nation of about a million people; their country lies mainly in the forest belt of West Africa. They divide themselves into eight uterine clans, each of which postulate a common ancestors but does not claim to know the precise line of descent from her to living persons. Within each village, representatives of most of the clans are to be found, and the clansmen within a village usually do know their descent from the ancestors who founded their particular lineage segment of the clan. The village contains four or five perhaps all eight-of the clans.

Each lineage has a local headman chosen by its male members from nominations made by its senior women. In addition, a village headman is chosen from one specific clan; the headman clan varies from village to village. There are at least some areas where each of the eight clans provides the headman.

The main task of these village headmen is to settle the disputes that arise in the community. In Ashanti theory, each lineage head must, with the other elders of the lineage sitting in a sort of committee, settle disputes among the members of that lineage. The group of lineage representatives, also sitting as a committee and perhaps assisted by the elders of the village, settles disputes among the villagers who belong to different lineages. There is a formal court procedure, with pleading, witness, and decisions, although usually it is resorted to only after all efforts at informal reconciliation have failed. These men have powerful sanctions; they can banish a person from the community. This is not now so powerful a sanction as it once was, but before the pax Britanica it was equivalent to death in the bush, without friends or assistance, or else to slavery.

These local clan heads have two or more titles. The first is the clan name followed by the word hene, which means “chief”, the whole followed by the name of the village: “X-clan chief of village A”. The second title comes from the military organization. Each village has a closely organized military system. Though there are many variations in detail, the titles reflect the formation in which the army went into battle. The army was led into action by groups of scouts, armed with guns as well as long sticks tipped with wooden hooks for use in shaking the trees to draw enemy fire. Just behind them came the advance guard that infiltrated through the scouts as soon as the former had made contact with the enemy. They were followed by the main body of troops. At the rear of the man’s body marched the chief, surrounded by his personal bodyguard, of which there were two chief officers. The rear guard always faced the rear as the column went into action, maintaining this position until the enemy was routed, whereupon they, in turn, infiltrated through all the rest and took up the pursuit. On either side of the main body were the left wing and right wing, whose tactical mission was to outflank the enemy. Each wing had a commander.

The organization of the village locality, then, is fairly simple: each of the matrilineal lineages-held together internally by the reciprocal obligations of kinsmen-sends its representative to a council whose task is to maintain law and order between descent groups, where different sanctions are felt to be necessary: the relationships among these lineage representatives is expressed in military titles, reminiscent of the sanction of force.

So much for local government Ashanti also had a type of confederacy among these village groups. When the Ashanti introduced the concept of an organization among several village localities, one of the villages of the larger unit-which can be called the division-was singled out as the capital village. The other villages were then associated by ties with the chief of the capital village, who became thus the paramount chief of the division.

If the divisional organization had been entirely consistent with the village organization, each of the chiefs of the noncapital villages would have become an elder of the chief of the capital village-that is, chiefs would have made up the council of the paramount chief. But this was precisely not the case. The chief of the capital village had a group of council members above him already: the heads of the various lineages domiciled in his village. When the chief of the capital village assumed the office of paramount chief of the division, he retained the same council. Thus, not only was the chief of one village elevated to a new and higher position, but his elders also took on new responsibilities and relationships. The personnel of the court of the paramount chief were the same, in skeleton, as the personnel of the chief’s court in his capital village.

In order for the paramount chief to administer his division, then, each elder or councilman of the paramount chief was made the official “friend at court” for one or more of the outlying chiefs. The outlying chiefs had no direct access to the paramount chief, but had always to go through their various friends at court. Likewise, orders from the paramount chief to an outlying chief were given via the latter’s friend at court. The friend at court had no authority over the outlying chief; he was only on intermediary. These links of the various outlying chiefs to the paramount chief did not prelude their having friendships and pacts with one another. When two outlying chiefs dealt directly, they did as equals.

In a manner entirely consistent, the outlying chiefs did not become commanders in the army of the paramount chief-he had army commanders already. Rather, the entire army of a subordinate outlying chief was added to the right wing, say, of the small local army of the paramount chief, while the army of another outlying chief was added to the main body. In addition, then, to the link through the friend at court, the paramount chief appointed his close clansmen as liaison officials with these attached armies and their chiefs and commanders. The army, in other words, was kept on a strictly territorial basis, yet the whole could be welded into a single fighting unit, based on a cadre of the capital village.

Even in a system as consistent as the Ashanti, however, there were exceptions. Many of the paramount chief’s councilors, who were also lineage heads had villages placed directly under their authority. These villages-most of which grew up from hunting camps in the forests after the division was a functioning entity-had a headman, but not a chief. Most of such villages seem to have been granted to elders as rewards for outstanding services. Others seem to have been villages that originally owed allegiance to the paramount chief, in one of his other offices, which he gave away in order to reduce the confusion that often arose when he was both chief and paramount chief.

There is one step needed to complete the pyramidal picture of the Ashanti state: the king himself, and the organization within his territorial division, and the ways the paramount chieftainships were organized to form the nation. First of all, in the division that came to be in the national capital, Kumasi, the method of organization was even more militarized than in the other divisions: the system of lineage heads had been subordinated to, though by no means replaced by, a system of military companies or battalions. The leaders of these companies usually were appointed by the king, though many of them became hereditary, frequently but not always in the uterine line. Aside from this fact, however, the workings of Kumasi division were much like those of any other division the outlying paramount chiefs tended to be attached to the king through one of his councilors-an official in the smaller territorial army of the king.

The Ashanti state was thus visualized by the Ashanti themselves in terms of military organization. Actually, the ties between the paramount chiefs and their subordinate chiefs, between the king and the paramount chiefs, were loose ones. Ashanti history contains many instances in which this or that broke off his relationship and revolted against a particular king, though none apparently against the idea of Ashanti kingship. This is a very important point: revolution against a form of government is of a different nature from, and much rarer than, mere revolt against a specific administration or specific man. There are kingships in East Africa in which revolt against a particular king is a constitutionalized aspect of preserving the kingship itself. Revolution to overthrow a constitution appears to have been very rare in Africa until recently; revolt against particular office holders on the other hand seems to have been usual.

Every Paramount chief among the Ashanti also had to recognize the tribunal of the king as a superior court-any person could have his case transferred there by committing the tribal taboo of swearing a certain oath, which for religious reasons could be dealt with only by the king. Every paramount chief took an oath of allegiance to the king at the time that he assumed his position, and renewed it every year at the national ceremony known in English as the “yam Custom”. The king also took an oath to govern in accordance with the custom of the realm, and to take the advice of his councilors on matters affecting them all. Aside from military situations, the king’s governing functions were slight: the so-called ancestral cults of which he was chief priest and practitioner were national cults. But except in the fields of war and religion, and for the fact that his court was the highest in the land, most of the government was in the hands of the paramount chiefs and their subordinates, the village chiefs.

It would appear that the burden of taxation imposed by the national government was light, and that much of the expense of the national administration, consisting mainly of ceremonies and wars, was borne by the capital. The king did, however, have special attendants who carried on an extensive trade in his name and for his profit, which provided the major source of the national revenue.

In summary, government officials in the traditional Ashanti system were military commanders. They were also priests. One of the basic obligations of a king or chief was to provide the religious needs of his subjects. The authority structure was, however, very weak, and was easily broken. The greatest change that the English administration made was to give strength to the bonds that united the villagers together despite divisions and the divisions together into the confederation.

7. STATELESS POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS

One of the best examples of the non state societies whose political system is based on non kinship groups is to be found in the traditional system of the Hopi of northern Arizona. Their political organization was made up of a balance achieved among ritual and religious groups; each man, when he became an adult, joined one of these groups, and the government was formed, without a hierarchy of officers, through a balance of the ritual groups in an annual cycle of festivals.

The political organization based on the extended family can be found in any society composed of bands or herders-most of these groups are in fact hunters and gatherers. The businessmen of the Kalahari Desert and the Australian aborigines are classic examples. Among North American Indians, the Comanche and the Basin Shoshone are good examples.

The political organization based solely on the unilineal descent group is typical of parts of Melanesia and of Africa. The examples to be given briefly here is of the Tiv of central Nigeria. Tiv are organized into a system of lineages based on the principle of segmental opposition. Each lineage, at every level, is associated with a territory. Therefore, the lineage, at every level, is associated with a territory. Therefore, the lineage system supplies a mode of organizing the view of geography. Each lineage is described, through males, from a single male ancestor; each also has its territory. That territory is beside the territory of the lineage descended from the brother of the founder of the first. The two, taken together, make up a larger lineage descended from the father of the two brothers. Their combined territories form the territory of the inclusive lineage, and so forth.

In such a situation, how are war and fighting controlled? The main, device is one based on a simple rule of self-interest: if two people are fighting, the third joins the one to whom he is most closely related. If both are equally distantly related, the third man does not join in, but rather he stops the fight.

Thus, if lineage A fights with lineage B, no member of lineages C or D will join in – they will do their best to stop the fight. Besides this, there is a series of blood pacts between alternate lineages-those that do not bound one another on the ground. Such pacts make it a mystical and religious sin to draw blood from a person of the other lineage: hence they cannot fight each other-neither can they marry each other.

In the same situation, disputes are settled within the lineage by the lineage elders. Disputes between lineages are settled either by fighting or by meetings and activities, which verge on what Westerners think of as diplomacy. If I have a dispute with a member of that lineage over there-if, say, he owes me a goat, I go take a goat from him or one of his kinsmen and bring it home. I immediately tell my lineage what I have done. If I can convince them that he did in fact owe me the goat, and that I have performed my side of the bargain, they will stick by me, and we will use our force to defy the others to take the goat back. If, however, I fail to convince them of the rightness of my deed, then they will make me give the goat back in order to save themselves a fight. In cases of divorce, elders of the whole lineages meet with one another to work out a modus vivendi and the rights involved in the matter. Courts were established by the British and spread throughout Tivland. But they were not indigenous. For a court, properly so-called, must have personnel with authority granted to them. Tiv grant political authority to no one. Every dispute is settled and every war is fought on the basis of a power system, not an authority system. It is the order of a sort-ordered anarchy. It enables one to predict what will happen. But it is not really government, and it is certainly not a state.

8. Summary

• To maintain an orderly system of social relations people have to be subjected to some degree of compulsion; they cannot, all the time, do exactly as they like. For often self-interest may incite behaviour incompatible with the common good, and so it is that in every society some rules, some kinds of constraint on people’s behaviour are acknowledged and, on the whole, adhered to. These rules and the means by which they are enforced differ greatly from society to society, but always they more or less effectively secure some degree of social order.
• Elman Service (1962) listed four types, or levels, of political organization: band, tribe, chiefdom and state.
• Bands have been found primarily among foragers, especially self sufficient pedestrian foragers.
• A tribe is a somewhat more complex type of acephalous society than a band. As the population size increases with a shift in subsistence pattern from foraging to horticulture or pastoralism, it eventually reaches a point at which kinship ties and friendship are no longer sufficient to hold society together. This is especially the case when there are hundreds of people and multiple communities.
• Unlike bands and tribes, however, chiefdoms are characterized by permanent political regulation of the territory they administer. Chiefdoms might include thousands of people living in many villages and or hamlets. Regulation was carried out by the chief and his or her assistants, who occupied political offices. In the Polynesian chiefdoms, the chiefs were full-time political specialists in charge of regulating the economy-production, distribution, and consumption.
• Social status in chiefdoms was based on seniority of descent. Because rank, power, prestige, and resources came through kinship and descent, Polynesian chiefs kept extremely long genealogies.
• A state is a formal organization roles in which legal and military authority is vested and in which such authority is considered by the members of the state to be its primary purpose. The state is a special social group charged with allocating authority to use physical force in order to achieve peace and conformance with law and custom on the one hand, and to maintain territorial and cultural integrity against external threats on the other.
• The first of the African states to be described is the Swazi state enclaved within the Republic of South Africa. The Swazi are a large tribe who are not a part of South Africa, but are one of the two so-called “High Commission Territories “and come directly under the Colonial Secretary in Her Majesty’s government. The present-day lives of Swazi are more or less dominated by South Africa, and they are economically a part of South Africa and subject to much the same sort of economic pressures to leave their tribal areas and go out to work in order to earn money.
• The Ashanti are a nation of about a million people; their country lies mainly in the forest belt of West Africa. They divide themselves into eight uterine clans, each of which postulate a common ancestors but does not claim to know the precise line of descent from her to living persons. Within each village, representatives of most of the clans are to be found, and the clansmen within a village usually do know their descent from the ancestors who founded their particular lineage segment of the clan. The village comprises of four or five perhaps all eight-of the clans.
• One of the best examples of the non state societies whose political system is based on non kinship groups is to be found in the traditional system of the Hopi of northern Arizona. Their political organization was made up of a balance achieved among ritual and religious groups; each man, when he became an adult, joined one of these groups, and the government was achieved, without a hierarchy of officers, through a balance of the ritual groups in an annual cycle of festivals.
• The political organization based on the extended family can be found in any society composed of bands or herders-most of these groups are in fact hunters and gatherers. The businessmen of the Kalahari Desert and the Australian aborigines are classic examples. Among North American Indians, the Comanche and the Basin Shoshone are good examples.