Chapter 13

Political Organization and Social Control

What We Will Learn

• What are the different types of political organization?

• What are the various theories concerning the origins of the state?

• In the absence of kings, presidents, legislatures, and bureaucracies, how is social order maintained in stateless societies?

• What are the causes of war?

Three Dimensions of Political Organization

1. Extent to which political institutions are distinct from other aspects of the social structure.

2. Extent to which authority is concentrated into specific political roles.

3. Level of political integration (the size of the territorial group that comes under the control of the political structure).

Four Types of Political Structures

• Band societies• Tribal societies• Chiefdoms• State societies

Band Societies

• The basic social unit found in many hunting-and-gathering societies.

• These societies are characterized by being kinship based and having no permanent political structure.

• Most bands number between 30 and 50 people.

Band Societies

• Little concept of individual property ownership with a high value on sharing, cooperation, and reciprocity.

• Little role specialization and highly egalitarian.

• Thought to be the oldest form of political organization.

Tribal Societies

• Small-scale societies composed of a number of autonomous political units sharing common linguistic and cultural features.

• Found most often among food producers.

Tribal Societies• Tend to have populations that are larger,

denser, and somewhat more sedentary.• Leadership is informal and not vested in a

centralized authority.• Pan-tribal mechanisms such as clans, age

grades, and secret societies that cut across kinship lines and serve to integrate all of the local segments of the tribe into a larger whole.

Tribal Societies

• Tribal societies, such as the Samburu of Kenya, have certain pan-tribal mechanisms, such as clans and age organizations, which serve to integrate the tribe as a whole.

Chiefdoms• Political authority is likely to reside with a single

individual, acting alone or in conjunction with an advisory council.

• Integrate a number of local communities in a formal and permanent way.

• Made up of local communities that differ from one another in terms of rank and status.

• Chiefships are hereditary, and the chief and immediate kin are a social and political elite.

State Systems

• Most formal and complex form of political organization.

• Authority of the state rests on two important foundations.

1. The state holds exclusive right to use force and physical coercion.

2. The state maintains authority by means of ideology.

Specialized Political Roles

• Assignment and training of people who will carry out very specific tasks such as law enforcement, tax collection, dispute settlement, recruitment of labor, and protection from outside invasions.

Voluntaristic Theory of State Formation (Childe)

• The theory that suggests that stable systems of state government arose because people voluntarily surrendered some of their autonomy to the state in exchange for certain benefits.

Hydraulic Theory of State Formation (Wittfogel)

• The notion that early state systems of government arose because small-scale farmers were willing to surrender a portion of their autonomy to a large government entity in exchange for the benefits of large-scale irrigation systems.

Coercive Theory of State Formation (Carneiro)

• The argument that the state came into existence as a direct result of warfare.

• Although warfare is the mechanism of state formation, it operates only in areas that have limited agricultural land for expanding populations.

The Modern Nation-State

• A nation is a group of people who share a common symbolic identity, culture, history, and often, religion.

• A state is a particular type of political structure distinct from a band, tribal society, or chiefdom.

• The term nation-state refers to a group of people sharing a common cultural background and unified by a political structure that they all consider legitimate.

Gender and the Nation-State

• The existence of millions of excess men in China, brought about by gender bias, may increase that nation's willingness to settle its disagreements through warfare.

Question

• The least complex form of political arrangement is the ________, characterized by small groups of food collectors.

a) chiefdomb) bandc) tribed) state

Answer: b

• The least complex form of political arrangement is the band, characterized by small groups of food collectors.

Question

• In societies known as ________, political authority is likely to reside with a single individual, acting alone or with an advisory council.

a) bandsb) statesc) chiefdomsd) tribes

Answer: c

• In societies known as chiefdoms, political authority is likely to reside with a single individual, acting alone or with an advisory council.

Question

• The ________ system of government is the most formal and most complex form of political organization.

a) band

b) tribe

c) state

d) chiefdom

Answer: c

• The state system of government is the most formal and most complex form of political organization.

Changing State Systems of Government• The global historical trend during the last

several decades has been toward democracy and away from autocracy.

• Democracy refers to the type of political system in which power is exercised, usually through representatives, by the people as a whole.

• Autocracy refers to the type of political system that denies popular participation in the process of governmental decision making.

Changing State Systems of Government• According to Freedom House an organization that

tracks political trend:• By the end of 2005 , 22 of the world’s 192

governments were electoral democracies, up from 66 countries 18 years earlier.

• Between 1975 and 2005:• Number of free countries increased from 40 to 89• Number of partially free countries increased from

53 to 58• Number of countries deemed not free declined

from 65 to 45

Democracy• The worldwide trend

during the last several decades has been toward greater participatory democracy.

• Here a South African woman casts her vote in the nation's first post-apartheid election, in 1994.

The Internet and Democracy

• In order for the Internet to be a democratizing force, it must provide access to all people, not just those who can afford the technology.

• Western technology firms have helped the Chinese government limit free expression by blocking access to political websites and selling filtering equipment.

The Internet and Democracy• In December 2005, at the request of the

Chinese government, Microsoft closed down the blog of a Chinese journalist who was critical of the government.

• Officials at Yahoo! admitted it had helped the Chinese government sentence a dissident to 10 years in prison by identifying him as the sender of a banned e-mail message.

The Internet and Democracy

• To what extent can this impoverished man from Calcutta, India, rely on the Internet to protect himself from a repressive government?

Variations in Political Aspects of World Cultures

Variations in Socioeconomic Aspects of World Cultures

Social Control

• Every society must ensure that most of the people behave themselves in appropriate ways most of the time.

• Social norms are normal, proper, or expected ways of behaving.

• Deviance is a violation of social norms. • Sanctions are institutionalized ways of

encouraging people to conform to the norms.

Social Control

• Societies control behavior with both positive and negative sanctions.

Social Norms in the U.S.

Informal Social Controls• Political coerciveness

• The capacity of a political system to enforce its will on the general population.

• Socialization• Teaching the young people the norms in a

society.• Public opinion

• What the general public thinks about an issue.

Informal Social Controls• Degradation ceremonies

• Deliberate and formal societal mechanisms designed to publicly humiliate someone who has broken a social norm.

• Corporate lineages• Kinship groups whose members engage in

daily activities together.

Informal Social Controls

• Supernatural belief systems• A set of beliefs that transcend the

natural, observable world. • Ancestor worship

• The souls are considered supernatural beings and fully functioning members of a descent group.

Informal Social Controls• Ghost invocation

• The practice of calling forth the wrath of ancestor gods against an alleged sinner.

• Ghostly vengeance • The belief that ancestor gods (ghosts) will

punish sinners.• Witchcraft

• An inborn, involuntary, often unconscious capacity to cause harm to other people.

Supernatural Forces

• Many people in the world, including these Islamic worshippers in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, tend to conform to social norms out of a strong belief in supernatural forces.

Question

• _______ refers to the way in which power is distributed within a society so as to control peoples' behavior and maintain social order.

a) Political organizationb) Social orderc) Gender stratificationd) Religion

Answer: a

• Political organization refers to the way in which power is distributed within a society so as to control peoples' behavior and maintain social order.

Age Organization

• A type of social organization, found in East Africa and among certain Native American groups, wherein people of roughly the same age pass through different levels of society together.

• Each ascending level, based on age, carries with it increased social status and rigidly defined roles.

Age-Graded Society

Age Organization• Age set

• A group of people roughly the same age who pass through various age grades together.

• Age grades• Permanent age categories in a society

through which people pass during the course of a lifetime.

Formal Social Controls

• Song duel• A means of settling disputes over wife

stealing among the Inuit involving the use of song and lyrics to determine one’s guilt or innocence.

• Intermediaries • Mediators of disputes among

individuals or families within a society.

Formal Social Controls• Moots

• Informal hearings of disputes for the purpose of resolving conflicts, usually found in small scale societies.

• Council of elders• A formal control mechanism composed of a

group of elders who settle disputes among individuals within a community.

Formal Social Controls• Oath

• The practice of having God bear witness to the truth of what a person says.

• Ordeal• A painful and possibly life-threatening test inflicted on

someone suspected of wrongdoing.• Rebellion

• An attempt within a society to disrupt the status quo and redistribute the power and resources.

Formal Social Controls

• Revolution• An attempt to overthrow the existing form of

political organization, the principles of economic production and distribution, and the allocation of social status.

• Law• Cultural rules that regulate human behavior

and maintain order.

Social Controls• Archbishop Desmond

Tutu served as Co-Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which used traditional African philosophies of law and justice to heal racial hatreds and distrust after decades of segregation in the Republic of South Africa.

Causes of War

• Social problems• When internal social problems exist,

political leaders may turn the society’s frustrations toward another group.

• The outsiders may be portrayed as having more than their share of scarce resources or even as causing the social problems.

Causes of War• Perceived threats

• Societies may go to war when they feel that their security or well-being is in jeopardy.

• The people of North Vietnam during the 1960s were willing to wage war because they felt that their security was threatened by the French and Americans in the southern part of Vietnam.

• The Americans felt that Vietnam, and indeed all of Asia, was being threatened by the presence of a godless, communist regime; if South Vietnam fell to the communists, the entire free world would be threatened.

Causes of War• Political motivations

• Sometimes governments will wage war to further their own political objectives.

• Moral objectives• Europeans waged the Crusades against the Islamic

infidels because they were convinced that God was on their side.

• Accounts of those same wars written by Islamic historians depict the European Christians as the godless bad guys.

War on Terrorism

• In reference to the “war on terrorism”, equating terrorism with Islam is misleading because: • Islam is no more violent than other

world religions (including Christianity). • There is evidence to suggest that

terrorist attacks are directed toward secular ends rather than religious ones.

Terrorists

• Are these Hamas “terrorists” in Gaza fighting for religious principles or secular ones?