Political Systems & Social Control

Every human society has to answer the same three questions: who decides, how do we keep order, and what happens to the person who breaks the rules. What differs — enormously — is the machinery built to answer them. Some societies have no chiefs, no courts, no police, and no jails, and yet almost no one steals, because gossip, ridicule, and the fear of being left out do the work that a legal system does elsewhere. Others concentrate the power to tax, conscript, imprison, and execute in the hands of a very few. This chapter walks the whole range, from the campfire consensus of a foraging band to the tax rolls of an empire, and asks the political anthropologist's favorite question: how does anyone ever get anyone else to obey?

Section 1Types of political organization

Politics without government

Start by unlearning something. In everyday English, "politics" means elections, parties, and parliaments — the visible apparatus of a state. For anthropologists, political organization is much broader: it is whatever means a society uses to make collective decisions, allocate authority, and keep the peace. By that definition every society is political, including the many that never built a government at all. A group of thirty Ju/'hoansi foragers in the Kalahari deciding where to camp next is doing politics. So is a Nuer cattle camp working out whose herd grazes which pasture. The apparatus is invisible only if you are looking for the wrong thing.

The most widely taught framework comes from Elman Service, who in Primitive Social Organization (1962) sorted political systems into four types: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. Morton Fried, in The Evolution of Political Society (1967), proposed a parallel scheme keyed to inequality rather than scale: egalitarian, ranked, stratified, and state societies. Learn both. Service tells you how big and how organized a system is; Fried tells you who gets more.

The four types

A band is the smallest and least formal unit — typically a few dozen people, related by kinship and marriage, subsisting by foraging, moving seasonally. Leadership is situational and persuasive: the best tracker leads the hunt, the eldest woman is heeded about plant foods, and nobody can command anyone. Decisions are made by talking until everyone agrees, or until the dissenters leave. That last option, fission, is the band's most powerful political tool. When Richard Lee lived among the Ju/'hoansi of the Dobe area in the 1960s, he found no office of chief at all; a man whom outsiders had labeled a "headman" told him flatly that all people were headmen over themselves.

A tribe is larger, usually horticultural or pastoral, and held together by pantribal sodalities — institutions that cut across local groups. Clans, age sets, and men's societies do this work. The Maasai age-set system moves young men through named grades together, creating loyalties that stretch across the whole society. Crucially, tribes still lack centralized authority. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer of the upper Nile, in what is now South Sudan, The Nuer (1940), described a segmentary lineage system in which groups merge to face a more distant enemy and split again when the threat passes: lineages that feud with each other on Tuesday unite against an outside lineage on Wednesday. Order emerges from balanced opposition rather than from a ruler.

A chiefdom introduces something new and consequential: a permanent office of leadership, filled by inheritance, that outranks everyone else even when its current occupant is unimpressive. Chiefdoms are ranked societies — every lineage sits somewhere on a ladder of prestige relative to the chiefly line. The chief collects goods and gives them out again at feasts, a pattern called redistribution that both feeds people and advertises the chief's centrality. Polynesia is the classic laboratory: in Hawai'i, Tonga, and Samoa, chiefs held sacred power (mana) hedged by ritual prohibitions (tapu). In North America, the Mississippian centers of the Southeast, the Natchez, and the Timucua polities were chiefdoms, as were the Northwest Coast societies whose potlatch feasts validated rank through spectacular giving.

A state adds centralized administration, permanent specialized institutions, and, in Max Weber's famous phrase, a claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. States are stratified: access to basic resources is unequal by law, not merely by prestige. They typically appear alongside intensive agriculture, dense population, record-keeping, standing military force, and taxation — in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus, Shang China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, where the Inca state of Tawantinsuyu ran a labor-tax system (mit'a) and a road network across thousands of kilometers using knotted-cord quipu records rather than writing as we usually define it.

Section 2Power and authority

Power, authority, and legitimacy

The sociologist Max Weber gave anthropology its sharpest tool here. Power is the ability to make people do what you want even against their will — it can rest on nothing but force. Authority is power that people accept as rightful. The difference is legitimacy, and legitimacy is not a mood; it is a claim that something has made credible. Weber identified three such somethings. Traditional authority rests on inherited custom: this person leads because their line has always led. Charismatic authority rests on extraordinary personal qualities attributed to an individual — prophets, revolutionaries, founders. Rational-legal authority rests on impersonal rules: the office carries the power, the officeholder is temporary, and a bureaucrat who exceeds the rules is acting illegitimately even if the results are good.

A hard question follows: can anyone hold authority and no power at all? Among the Nuer, the leopard-skin chief was a ritual mediator who could offer sanctuary to a killer and press the two sides toward a settlement in cattle. He had no army, no jail, and no ability to compel a single person. His only leverage was the threat of a curse and the community's shared wish to see the bloodshed end. Evans-Pritchard's point was that in a society with no state, order can be produced by a man everyone respects and no one has to obey.

Earning it versus inheriting it

Marshall Sahlins drew the classic contrast in a 1963 essay, "Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief." The Melanesian big man holds achieved status. He builds a following one person at a time by working hard, marrying strategically, raising pigs, and giving them away in competitive exchange — the moka of Mount Hagen, described by Andrew Strathern, in which a man's prestige rises with what he hands over and the debts he thereby creates. His influence is personal, laborious, and mortal: it dies with him, and it evaporates if his followers drift away. The Polynesian chief, by contrast, holds ascribed status. He does not build a following; he inherits one, along with a title, a genealogy reaching to the gods, and the right to demand tribute. A lazy big man is nobody. A lazy chief is still the chief.

Where power is inherited and sacred, its display becomes a form of governance in itself. Clifford Geertz argued in Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980) that the Balinese kingdoms were not primarily machines for taxing and coercing; their central activity was mass ritual, and the state existed to stage the spectacle that made the ruler an exemplary center of the cosmos. Power there was less a matter of what the king could force than of what the ceremony could make people believe about the order of the world — a reminder that the symbolic and the political are not separate departments. It is the same insight Geertz applied to the Balinese cockfight: a public performance can be an argument about status that everyone present understands.

Section 3Social control and law

Norms and sanctions

Social control is the whole set of processes that get people to conform to the expectations of their group. It rests on norms: shared rules about how one ought to behave. William Graham Sumner's old distinction, drawn in Folkways (1906), still earns its keep. Folkways are norms of ordinary courtesy whose violation makes you odd — eating with the wrong hand, standing too close. Mores are norms felt to be morally serious, whose violation makes you dangerous or disgusting — incest, treachery, killing a kinsman. Both are enforced by sanctions, which come in four flavors: positive or negative, formal or informal. A medal is a positive formal sanction; a prison sentence is a negative formal one; a warm welcome is positive and informal; being talked about behind your back is negative, informal, and often the most effective of the four.

Most order, in most societies, most of the time, comes from the informal side. Gossip, ridicule, shaming, avoidance, and the withdrawal of cooperation are quietly ferocious in a small community where you cannot move away and everyone you will ever need is watching. Accusations of witchcraft do similar work. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) showed that Azande witchcraft beliefs were not random superstition but a coherent way of explaining particular misfortune — why this granary fell on this man on this afternoon — and, in practice, a system that made it dangerous to be conspicuously stingy, envious, or antisocial, because those were the people who got named. Belief in witches punished exactly the behavior that frays a community.

Some societies formalize this without building a court. Among the Tolai of New Britain, the masked Duk-Duk society appeared to collect debts, enforce obligations, and impose fines; the mask depersonalized the enforcement so that the sanction came from the society itself rather than from a neighbor with a grudge. Among Inuit groups, a grievance could be settled by a song duel, in which the disputants traded composed insults before an audience whose laughter decided the winner — a genuine legal proceeding whose only penalty was public opinion.

What makes something law

Bronislaw Malinowski attacked the idea that societies without courts have no law. In Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926) he argued that Trobriand order rested on reciprocity: a coastal fisherman delivers to his inland partner because he will need garden produce traded back, and the mutual dependence built into the exchange is what binds the obligation. Law, on this reading, is what people are actually held to, not what a legislature has written down. The comparative study of law took a further step with Karl Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel, whose The Cheyenne Way (1941) reconstructed Cheyenne law from remembered cases — actual disputes and how they were settled — rather than from abstract rules. Hoebel later proposed in The Law of Primitive Man (1954) that a norm counts as legal when its breach is met by the socially recognized application of force by someone with the recognized privilege to apply it.

Anthropologists therefore distinguish customary law — unwritten, precedent-based, embedded in kinship and community — from codified law, which is written, enforced by specialized officials, and typically the possession of states. The two do not simply replace one another. Legal pluralism is the ordinary condition of the modern world: village elders, religious tribunals, customary councils, and national courts all operate over the same people at once, and litigants shop among them, choosing the forum most likely to give them what they want.

Section 4Conflict

Feud, raid, and war

Anthropologists separate three things that English tends to lump together. A feud is protracted hostility between kin groups within the same society, driven by the obligation to avenge a wrong; it is bounded by shared norms and usually ends in a settlement rather than a conquest. A raid is a short, limited expedition to take something specific — livestock, goods, captives. Warfare is organized, socially sanctioned armed conflict between political communities, and its intensity scales with political complexity: bands skirmish, tribes fight seasonally over land and honor, states conquer and annex.

The Nuer feud is the textbook case because Evans-Pritchard showed exactly how a society with no police keeps a killing from tearing it apart. A homicide obligated the victim's lineage to retaliate. The killer took refuge with the leopard-skin chief, who then shuttled between the groups until the dead man's kin agreed to accept blood wealth — historically some forty head of cattle — in place of a life. Notice how the cattle work: they are not merely a fine but the means by which the dead man's kin will obtain a wife whose sons will carry his name. The compensation literally replaces the person.

In the New Guinea highlands, the Dani of the Grand Valley practiced a form of ritualized warfare, described by Karl Heider, in which arranged battles between alliances were fought on known ground with an etiquette of their own, and were understood as an obligation owed to the ghosts of the slain rather than a campaign to seize territory. Among the Enga, Mervyn Meggitt's Blood Is Their Argument (1977) traced clan fighting to intense competition for garden land as population pressed against a fixed resource. Enga conflict resolution is as elaborate as Enga conflict: fighting closes with negotiated compensation paid in pigs and valuables, a ceremony that reopens exchange between enemies and thereby restores the relationship the fighting had suspended.

Is warfare human nature?

This is where anthropology has been most contentious, and the caution matters. Napoleon Chagnon's work on the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil, published as Yãnomamö: The Fierce People (1968), presented raiding and revenge as central to Yanomami life; in a separate and much-disputed 1988 study he further argued that men who had killed left more offspring than those who had not. The book became one of the best-selling ethnographies ever written and one of the most fiercely disputed. R. Brian Ferguson, in Yanomami Warfare: A Political History (1995), argued from the historical record that much of the fighting Chagnon observed had been intensified by the contact situation itself — competition over steel tools, mission stations, and trade goods introduced from outside — and that a snapshot taken during that disruption should not be read as timeless human nature. Yanomami people have since objected publicly to being labeled "fierce," and their objection is itself an ethnographic fact worth taking seriously. The methodological lesson generalizes: what an ethnographer records in a single decade may be a product of the very forces that brought the ethnographer there.

The comparative record does not support an inevitable species-wide bellicosity either. Some societies are strikingly nonviolent — Robert Dentan described the Semai of peninsular Malaysia as a people whose ideal of nonaggression was so strong that even open confrontation was avoided. Douglas Fry and others have compiled the ethnographic and archaeological evidence for peaceful societies and argue that what is genuinely universal is not violence but dispute-resolution machinery.

Making peace

Every society has procedures for stopping a fight, and they sort into a few recognizable forms. In mediation, a neutral third party helps the disputants reach their own agreement but cannot impose one — the leopard-skin chief again. In arbitration, both sides agree in advance to accept a third party's decision. In adjudication, an authority with the power to enforce hands down a binding judgment, which is what a state court does. James Gibbs's account of the Kpelle moot in Liberia — the "house palaver" — showed a fourth possibility: an informal hearing among kin and neighbors whose goal is not to determine a winner but to repair the relationship, with an apology and a token gift closing the matter. Gibbs called it therapeutic, and it is the ancestor of what is now marketed as restorative justice.

Section 5Political inequality

From ranked to stratified

Morton Fried's key move was to see that ranking and stratification are different animals. In a ranked society there are fewer positions of high prestige than there are people qualified to fill them, but everyone still has access to the resources needed to live — a Polynesian commoner had land. In a stratified society that access itself is unequal: some people own or control the means of production and others must obtain their living through them. Stratification is the threshold at which inequality stops being a matter of honor and becomes a matter of survival, and the state is the political form that arises to defend it.

How does a state hold a stratified order in place? Through several levers working together. Coercion: a standing army, police, prisons, and the claimed monopoly on legitimate violence. Extraction: taxation, tribute, labor service, rents. Law: codified rules and courts that define property and criminalize its redistribution. And ideology: the story that makes the arrangement look natural, ancient, sacred, or simply inevitable. The Assyrian palace gate flanked by colossal winged bulls, the Egyptian pyramid, the Inca stonework at Cusco, the Balinese royal cremation — these are not decoration. Monumental architecture and state ritual convert an argument about who should rule into a fact you cannot walk around.

Class, caste, and the politics of race

Stratified systems come in open and closed varieties. A class system is relatively open: position is partly achieved, mobility is possible in principle, and the boundaries are blurry — though anthropologists working in industrial societies have repeatedly documented how much less mobility exists in practice than the national ideology advertises. A caste system is closed: status is ascribed at birth, marriage is endogamous, and occupation and ritual standing are hereditary. Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus (1966) analyzed the Indian caste system as an order built on the opposition of purity and pollution; later scholars, including Nicholas Dirks, argued that Dumont underplayed politics and economics and that British colonial census-taking and administration hardened and standardized categories that had been considerably more fluid.

Race belongs in this section rather than in a chapter on biology. Franz Boas and his students spent careers dismantling the claim that humanity divides into ranked biological races with corresponding capacities; genetic evidence has only confirmed that racial categories do not carve up human variation consistently. Race is nonetheless intensely real as a political fact — a socially constructed classification with enormous consequences for who is policed, employed, housed, and believed. That is the anthropological point exactly: a category can be biologically incoherent and politically decisive at the same time. Colonial administrations demonstrated this at scale, converting flexible identities into fixed, governable ones through indirect rule, identity documents, and the census — the machinery of dividing the ruled among themselves.

Consent, and its refusal

States cannot afford to coerce everyone all the time; it is expensive. Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony names the cheaper alternative: rule that works because the subordinated have come to accept the dominant group's worldview as ordinary common sense. Hegemony is what makes an unequal arrangement feel like the weather. Structural violence names the result: suffering inflicted not by an identifiable attacker but by the ordinary operation of political and economic structures that put some people, predictably and repeatedly, in harm's way. The peace researcher Johan Galtung coined the phrase in 1969; the medical anthropologist Paul Farmer made it central to the discipline, using it to explain why disease, hunger, and early death track so closely with poverty and racism rather than falling at random.

Which is not the end of the story, because subordination is rarely total. James C. Scott, in Weapons of the Weak (1985), lived in a Malaysian village and documented what peasants do when open revolt would be suicidal: foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, pilfering, slander, sabotage, false compliance. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) he called the offstage critique that accompanies these tactics the hidden transcript — what people say about the powerful when the powerful are not listening — and in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) argued that upland peoples of Southeast Asia had for centuries chosen crops, settlement patterns, and social forms specifically to stay beyond the reach of lowland states. Read alongside Clastres, this is political anthropology's most useful corrective: evading the state is a political strategy, not a failure to invent one.

ReferenceWords worth knowing

A quick reference for the terms in this chapter — skim it now, or circle back whenever a word trips you up.

Adjudication

Settlement in which an authority with the power to enforce its ruling hands down a binding judgment, as a state court does.

Arbitration

Settlement in which disputants agree in advance to accept the decision of a third party they have chosen.

Authority

Power that is recognized as legitimate by those subject to it, and therefore obeyed without constant coercion.

Band

The smallest political unit: a small, kin-based, usually foraging group with informal, non-coercive leadership and decision by consensus.

Big man

A Melanesian leader whose influence is achieved through generosity, feast-giving, and competitive exchange, and which ends with his death.

Blood wealth

Compensation, classically in livestock, paid by a killer's kin group to the victim's kin group to forestall or end a feud.

Caste

A closed system of stratification in which status is ascribed at birth, marriage is endogamous, and occupation and ritual standing are hereditary.

Chiefdom

A ranked political system with a permanent, usually hereditary office of chief who adjudicates disputes and redistributes goods.

Codified law

Written law enacted and enforced by specialized institutions such as courts, police, and legislatures; characteristic of states.

Customary law

Unwritten, precedent-based rules embedded in kinship and community practice and enforced without a formal legal apparatus.

Everyday resistance

Scott's term for the low-risk tactics — foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, pilfering, false compliance — used by subordinate people when open revolt would be too dangerous.

Feud

Prolonged retaliatory hostility between kin groups within the same society, driven by the obligation to avenge a wrong.

Hegemony

Gramsci's term for domination achieved through consent, when a ruling group's worldview is accepted as ordinary common sense.

Hidden transcript

Scott's term for the offstage critique that subordinate people voice among themselves but never in front of the powerful.

Legal pluralism

The coexistence of several legal orders — customary, religious, and national — over the same population, among which litigants may choose.

Leveling mechanism

A social practice — ridicule, insult, obligatory sharing — that suppresses displays of superiority and keeps a group egalitarian.

Mediation

Settlement in which a neutral third party helps disputants reach their own agreement but cannot impose one.

Moot

An informal community hearing, such as the Kpelle house palaver, whose aim is to repair a relationship rather than to produce a loser.

Norm

A shared expectation about how one ought to behave; folkways govern etiquette, while mores carry serious moral weight.

Pantribal sodality

An association — a clan, age set, or men's society — that cuts across local residential groups and knits a tribe together without any central ruler.

Political organization

The means by which a society makes collective decisions, allocates authority, and maintains social order.

Power

The ability to make others act as one wishes, whether or not they consent.

Redistribution

An exchange pattern in which goods flow to a central figure such as a chief and are handed out again, typically at feasts, reinforcing that figure's centrality.

Sanction

A reward or penalty that enforces a norm; sanctions may be positive or negative and formal or informal.

Segmentary lineage system

A political structure, classically Nuer, in which descent groups merge against a more distant opponent and split apart again afterward.

State

A centralized political system with permanent bureaucracy, codified law, taxation, and a claimed monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Stratification

Institutionalized inequality of access to basic resources, as opposed to mere inequality of prestige.

Structural violence

Harm produced by the ordinary workings of political and economic structures rather than by an identifiable attacker; coined by Johan Galtung and developed in anthropology by Paul Farmer.

Tribe

A political system larger than a band, usually horticultural or pastoral, integrated by pantribal sodalities but still lacking centralized coercive authority.

Warfare

Organized, socially sanctioned armed conflict between separate political communities, as distinct from the internal revenge cycle of a feud.