Development Team

Paper No. : 02 Social-Cultural Anthropology Module : 26 Types of Political Organization Development Team Prof. Anup Kumar Kapoor Principal Investigator Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi, Delhi Prof. Sabita Acharya Paper Coordinator Department of Anthropology, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar Content Writer Dr. Abhijeeta Das SCSTRTI, Bhubaneswar, Odisha Prof. A. K. Sinha Content Reviewer Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh 1 Social-Cultural Anthropology Anthropology Types of Political Organization Description of Module Subject Name Anthropology Paper Name 02 Social-Cultural Anthropology Module Name/Title Types of Political Organization Module Id 26 2 Social-Cultural Anthropology Anthropology Types of Political Organization 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. 3 Social-Cultural Anthropology Anthropology Types of 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 4 Social-Cultural Anthropology Anthropology Types of Political Organization 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. 5 Social-Cultural Anthropology Anthropology Types of Political Organization 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.

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