Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy: a Principle of Culture's Organization. the 13Th
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Dmitri M. Bondarenko HOMOARCHY: A PRINCIPLE OF CULTURE'S ORGANIZATION The 13th – 19th Centuries Benin Kingdom As a Non-State Supercomplex Society Moscow: URSS, 2006 2 RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies Institute for African Studies Dmitri M. Bondarenko HOMOARCHY: A PRINCIPLE OF CULTURE'S ORGANIZATION The 13th – 19th Centuries Benin Kingdom As a Non-State Supercomplex Society Moscow: URSS, 2006 3 ББК ******** This study has been supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project # 06–06–80459) Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy: A Principle of Culture's Organization. The 13th – 19th Centuries Benin Kingdom As a Non-State Supercomplex Society. – Moscow: Editorial URSS. – 184 p. ISBN 5– Until quite recently, cultural evolution has commonly been regarded as the permanent teleological move to a greater level of hierarchy, crowned by state formation. However, recent research, particularly those based upon the principle of heterarchy – “... the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways” (Crumley 1995: 3) changes the usual picture dramatically. The opposite of heterarchy, then, would be a condition in society in which relationships in most contexts are ordered mainly according to one principal hierarchical relationship. This organizational principle may be called “homoarchy”. Homoarchy and heterarchy represent the most universal “ideal” principles and basic trajectories of socio- cultural (including political) organization and its transformations. There are no universal evolutionary stages – band, tribe, chiefdom, state or otherwise – inasmuch as cultures so characterized could be heterarchical or homoarchical: they could be organized differently, while having an equal level of overall social complexity. However, alternativity exists not only between heterarchic and homoarchic cultures but also within each of the respective types. In particular, the present article attempts at demonstrating that the Benin Kingdom of the 13th – 19th centuries, being an explicitly homoarchic culture not inferior to early states in the level of complexity, nevertheless was not a state as it lacked administrative specialization and pronounced priority of the supra-kin ties. The Benin form of socio-political organization can be called “megacommunity,” and its structure can be depicted as four concentric circles forming an upset cone: the extended family, community, chiefdom, and megacommunity (kingdom). Thus, the homoarchic megacommunity turns out an alternative to the homoarchic by definition (Claessen and Skalnнk 1978b: 640) early state. 4 Contents PREFACE. .. 5 I. WHAT IS HOMOARCHY? . 8 1. The notion of homoarchy: introduction and explanation 8 2. Principles of organization and systems of values 10 3. Principles of organization and structures of society 13 4. Some possible implications and prospects 14 II. WHAT IS CALLED THE STATE? 20 1. Conceptualizing the state: inevitable Eurocentrism? 20 2. The state: “to be or not to be?” 22 3. Centralization and bureaucratization: the criteria’s relevance for the 25 state theory 4. The Weber’s legacy: bureaucracy, violence, legitimation, and political 27 community III. WAS THERE BENIN BUREAUCRACY? 31 1. Weber’s theory vs. Benin realities 31 2. The sovereign as supreme administrator 39 3. The rulers and the ruled: political culture as a manifestation of 47 worldview 4. Benin reality: homoarchic supercomplexity without bureaucracy 55 IV. WAS BENIN A SUPRAKIN-BASED SOCIETY? 65 1. Anthropological theory: kin vs. territory, biological vs. social 65 2. Kinship, territoriality, and the phenomenon of the state 68 3. Socio-political composition of Benin: interaction of the part and the 73 whole 4. Benin community, the encompassing part of the whole 83 V. HOW TO CALL BENIN? 90 1. The local-institution-matrix (super)complex societies 90 2. Heterarchic local-institution-matrix (super)complex societies 93 3. Benin as a homoarchic local-institution-matrix supercomplex society 97 4. The Benin megacommunity in the wider context of anthropological 103 theory AFTERWARDS 109 NOTES 112 REFERENCES 126 5 Preface The story of this book is rather curious. It was written absolutely unintentionally. It grew out of a short paper prepared for, and presented at the panel “Alternativity in Cultural History: Heterarchy and Homoarchy as Evolutionary Trajectories” that I had proposed (together with Prof. Carole L. Crumley) for, and convened at the Third International Conference “Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations” held in Moscow, Russia in June 2004 (see the Conference book of abstracts, reports and proceedings: Alexeev et al. 2004; Bondarenko and Kavykin 2004; 2005; Bondarenko and Nemirovskiy 2006). The paper was so short that when the idea to publish the panel’s proceedings appeared, I had to write some more pages for transforming it into yet a rather short article. The article was submitted to the publisher along with other contributions (see Bondarenko 2006) but I was already thinking of writing a longer version for an academic journal. When the manuscript approached its fortieth “standard page”, I finally understood that it had become too long for a typical journal article. However, by that moment I had already felt unable to make myself stop writing, just as now I could not understand how less than a year before I was cudgeling my brains over the odd and funny problem of how to make the text at least a dozen pages long. So, I wrote this book out of despair: no other format of academic publication is able to comprise so many words and pages. Nevertheless, the text has turned out rather short again, this time for a book. So, the manuscript has passed the way from a short paper to a short article to a short book. Yet my modest hope is that the well-wishing reader will find in this opus some merits other than that it will not take him or her too much time to read it. If this turns out the case, the author will be even happier because though the book was really written occasionally and unexpectedly for himself, it deals with the problematics which he, this or that way, had been approaching and studying for not a short time at all, to which he has eventually devoted almost twenty years of academic career, in other words – of life. Besides my wife Natasha and daughter Tanechka to whom I cordially dedicate this book, I am indebted for constant support to my mother Lidia. I also regard as my great honor and privilege this chance to express deep and sincere gratitude to many colleagues. I would like to say “thank you” once again to all the participants in that very panel on alternativity in cultural history and to Carole Crumley (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA) who was preparing it and was to convene together with me but, to my and all the panel participants’ great pity, could not come to the Conference. I am grateful to David Small at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, USA) for supplying me with a photocopy of the inspiring and groundbreaking 6 Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies volume, unavailable from Russian libraries. My thanks go to Georgi and Lyubov Derluguian, Timothy Earle, David Easterbrook, William Irons, Robert Launay, Michael Tetelman, Akbar Virmani, Irwin Weil and my many other colleagues at Northwestern University (Evanston, USA) due to whose friendly attitude I have repeatedly studied at the University’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies in the 1990s – 2000s or had nice talks on the problematics related to the subject of this book, to Alf Lьdtke (Max Planck Institut fьr Geschichte, Gцttingen, Germany) upon whose kind invitation I got access to the most up to date academic literature in the libraries of Max Planck Institut fьr Geschichte and Universitдt Gцttingen in summer 2003, to Alexis Berelowitch (Universitй de Paris IV) and Michel Izard (College de France) owe to whose support I was fortunate to study at the libraries of Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale of College de France, and Center d’Йtudes Africaines of Ecole des Hautes Йtudes en Sciences Sociales (all in Paris, France) in May – June 2005, and to the Director and Vice-Director of the Institute for African Studies (Moscow, Russia), Alexei Vassiliev and Vladimir Shubin, who have given me opportunities to visit several African countries and supported in different ways my fieldwork in some of them from 1997 on. Last not least, I am also indebted for support and provocative discussions of different topics related to the problematics of this work to my immediate colleagues at the Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies, Moscow, Russia, especially to Dmitri Beliaev, Enver Kisriev, Andrey Korotayev, and Igor Sledzevsky, and at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, particuarly to Olga Artemova and Marina Butovskaya, as well as to Leonid Alaev (Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow, Russia), Vladimir Arseniev (Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia), Alexander Balezin (Institute of World History, Moscow, Russia), Herbert Barry III (University of Pittsburgh, USA), Vitaly Bezrogov (University of the Russian Academy of Education, Moscow), Robert Carneiro (American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA), David Christian (San Diego State University, USA), Claudio Cioffi-Revilla (George Mason University, Fairfax, USA), Henri Claessen (Leiden University, Netherlands), Leonid Grinin (“Uchitel” Publishing