Political Anthropology The Organization of Power

 The organizations and cultural processes that direct a society’s collective actions  All populations express political institutions, although they are more formally organized and obvious in some societies than they are in others.  The main operations of political organizations are: 1.determining public policy 2.preventing and resolving conflict 3.maintaining order 4.managing the distribution of social resources among the several sectors of society (i.e., determining “who gets what”, particularly with respect to wealth and power). Political Organization

w Influence w the ability to affect the behavior of others without coercion or holding an explicit leadership status or office Power, Authority and Influence w Power w the ability to exercise one’s will over others. w Authority w the socially approved use of power.

Political Anthropology w How are power and social control organized? distributed? manifested? Created? w How are group decisions made? w How is social order enforced? w How are conflicts dealt with? Because of the embeddedness it is better to talk of sociopolitical Culture and the Political Process

Mechanisms of Control w Internal (ideological) culturally instilled values expectation of supernatural harm or reward w External (behavioral) informal ridicule and ostracism, gossip praise formal laws and rules institutionalized threat of force

Law and Conflict Resolution w Formal and informal sanctions w Conflict mediators Often older men Nuer leopard skin chief Ordeals Oaths – supernatural source Oracles – people or things that have prophetic abilities Delphic Oracle, Greece

Compliance the process by which leaders mobilize followers and make their policies binding on their follower’s actions what motivates followers to follow them, even under conditions that expose followers to great risk  Any leader’s effectiveness at mobilizing support partly is the result of the political organization in which he/she acts.  attitudes that followers have may be more important to getting things done than is the form of organization with which the leader is associated.

Compliance 1. Coercion according to comparative sociologist Amitai Etzione there are three main mechanisms that leaders use to gain compliance  the use, or threatened use, of physical force to gain compliance; e.g., confinement, torture, and execution  Systematic use of force ultimately requires construction of police stations, military installations, prisons, and so on, plus maintaining the personnel to staff them. Its expensive 2. Remuneration  leaders provide a payoff in tangible benefits (e.g. income or property, personal security, social welfare support etc. ) to those who comply with their orders and policies.  Remuneration implies punishing the disloyal by withholding or removing benefits.

3. Intellectual Commitment  followers more or less spontaneously support a leaders because they are devoted to certain values and principles that the leader advocates.  followers sometimes support leaders on principle  The absence of force and payoff obviously puts attention on the power of shared culture to generate support.

Legitimacy Max Weber believed that there were three principal ways in which rule could be rendered legitimate, or rightful, in the eyes of the governed 1. Traditional Authority  Rule is accepted by followers because it is believed to be the correct moral order, usually a moral order that has a deep history—the “way things always have been.”  members are selected for office on the basis of loyalty, not job ability, they often have no expertise in their areas of bureaucratic responsibility

2. Rational-legal Authority  Authority established through rational legal means features has two key features: 1.the system of rule is created by laws that have popular support; and 2.leaders are selected and advanced on the basis of their ability to get the job done—by “rational” criteria.  leaders are legitimate because they are elevated in accordance with law, and because they are experts

3. Charismatic Authority  some leaders manage to obtain authority over a set of followers by opposing tradition and while operating outside the prevailing system of rule—without a lawful office.  Such persons are reformers who gain followings because followers believe that they are endowed with exceptional qualities or powers.  Often, they are believed to have a special relationship with God, or some other powerful deity.  However, some modern charismatic leaders appeal to secular values and acquire followers because of the followers’ belief that the leader is revealing errors in popular practices.  charismatic authority is most important as a source of change and reform in authority systems that are legitimized in other ways,

Political organizations vary cross culturally with respect to three main dimensions: 1.the level of integration, or numbers of communities over which the political system has jurisdiction; 2.the degree to which decisions that govern the group’s actions are centralized; and 3.the source of a leaders’ ability to direct the activities of others (i.e., whether that ability results from influence, authority, raw power, or some combination of those elements)

Degrees of Organizational Complexity w Uncentralized Band Tribe w Centralized Chiefdom State 1962, Elman Service In general, as the economy becomes more productive, population size increases leading to greater regulatory problems, which give rise to more complex social relations and linkages (greater social and political complexity).

Bands the political organization of foraging groups w Rarely more than people w kin-based w Flexible extended family units w No formal political organization w No socioeconomic stratification w the political order (polity) is not a distinct institution, but is embedded in the overall social order.

Bands w How are group decisions made? adult consensus informal leaders egalitarian w How is social order enforced? ridicule and ostracism w How are conflicts dealt with? negotiation/mediation mobility

w Multiple autonomous small communities that share common identity w Usually pastoralists or Horticulturalists w Several hundred to thousands of people w No formal political organization w Little socioeconomic stratification Tribes

w How are group decisions made? Consensus among descent groups w How are social norms enforced? ridicule and ostracism w How are conflicts dealt with? negotiation/mediation semi-official mediation Tribes

w achieved position comes with very limited authority. He cannot force or coerce people to do things. He can only persuade, harangue, and try to influence people to do things. w acts as a mediator in disputes, but has no authority to back his decision or impose punishments. w The village head must lead in generosity. He must be more generous, which means he must cultivate more land. He hosts feasts for other villages. modern-day Iroquois, New York Tribes The Village Head

w Big Man -like a village head, except that his authority is regional in that he may have influence over more than one village wisdom wealth generosity charisma. unofficial prestige status w The benefit is greater influence and community standing. Tribes –Big Man Nuer, Sudan

Pantribal Sodalities and Age Grades w Sodalities are non-kin- based organizations that may generate cross-societal linkages. often based on common age or gender. Some sodalities are confined to a single village. Some sodalities span several villages; these are called pantribal sodalities. they can mobilize a large number of men for raids.

Age Sets w sodalities that include all of the men or women born during a certain time w Similar to a cohort of class of students Members of an age set progress through a series of age grades together (e.g., initiated youth, warrior, adult, elder, (freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior, graduate). Sodalities create nonkin linkages between people based on age, gender, and ritual and create a sense of ethnic identity and belonging to the same cultural tradition

w Agriculturalists or pastoralists w Multiple communities that share common identity and tribute system w Thousands to many thousands of people w Centralized political organization based on hierarchical lineage system w a political unit of permanently allied tribes and villages under one recognized leader with authority w Significant socioeconomic stratification based on lineage Chiefdoms Old Chief of the Arawa Tribe, Rotorua, New Zealand.

w How are group decisions made? Chief and advisors w How is social order enforced? ridicule and ostracism official order use of force w How are conflicts dealt with? negotiation/mediation centralized arbitration Chiefdoms

w Small hierarchical bureaucracy w Tribute - tax paid to chief to be redistributed according to “community” needs w Chiefs – Leaders own, manage, and control basic factors of the economy and have special access to crops labor cash goods. Chiefdoms Grand chief Matthew Coon Come

Zulu Chief  Formalized leadership functions Unrelated to personal qualities Rules of succession (primogeniture) Office is permanent - it outlasts the individuals who occupy them Loyalty, status, coercion – but not too much Chiefdoms

w Agriculturalists w Multiple cities that share tax and administrative infrastructure system w Tens of thousands to billions of people w Centralized political organization possessing coercive power w Social stratification is a key distinguishing feature. w the rule of states is divorced from kinship; there is no pretense that the rulers constituents are kin States Calcutta

w How are group decisions made? rulers decide “on behalf of” populous w How is social order enforced? official enforcement threat or use of sanctions wHow are conflicts dealt with? negotiation/mediation centralized arbitration States Angkor

w Status not necessarily kin- based class-based w Codification of laws More formalized in industrial societies Courts – adjudicate and mediate Officials w Monopoly on use of force Police force States Hammurabi’s Code (1750 BC)

 Nearly all populations nowadays are governed by states to one degree of control or another degree.  However, where states have a poor tax base, or are weakened by internal disunity, their authority is not likely to be binding at local levels or in remote regions.  Thus, many traditional, non-state kinds of political organizations have not been drawn firmly under state control, and the lives of citizens in these areas are often affected more by historical political organizations than they are by the state itself. States

Tausug, which means "people of the current", is a Philippine ethnic group which lives in the northern part of Sulu province. Farming, fishing and trading are their major economic activities The Tausug

 The Tausug have a tenuous relationship with the central government of the Republic of the Philippines.  Legally the Tausug are integrated into the state bureaucracy. They elect local leaders, send representatives to congress etc.  But in practice the national Philippine state is too powerless in its southern provinces to govern them effectively  group actions continue to be mainly organized by informal, traditional organizations and leaders. The Tausug

 Most of their political operations carried through the ordinary, “multi-use” institutions of social life; e.g., kinship groups, age sets, religious associations, and so on