Acephalous Societies Bands and Tribes

Authority, Decisions, and Power: Political Anthropology ANTH 2301 Acephalous Societies: Bands and Tribes Any organisation lacking a recognised leader is acephalous. How do you decide where to go, how to get there, and who will pay for what when you go out with a group of friends? Most likely, someone will offer a recommendation, others will likely add their own thoughts, and you will all talk it through and come to an unofficial agreement. This is how a lot of tiny organisations operate. Many Europeans held the view until the early 20th century that all people were fundamentally self-centered and would only ever seek their own interests in the absence of civilization's moralising influences, which would have obliged them to act more cooperatively. They believed that any non-Western culture without of established authorities and rules would inevitably devolve into anarchic, violent, and ruled by force. Researchers studying anthropology found differently. People who live in tiny towns do perfectly fine without official leadership and legislation, just as you and your friends may make decisions without choosing a leader or putting regulations in paper. In these kinds of communities, authority is distributed across the community rather than being centralised in any official position of leadership. Although they may offer insightful counsel, elders and others with particular expertise are unable to impose their opinions. Their capacity to persuade others and create consensus within the group is the foundation of their authority. There will always be some in any society who seek to control others or impose their opinions on them, but others may usually ignore or avoid these individuals in the absence of a formal system that permits them to do so. Instead of chaos and conflict, the outcome is a social order that is largely cooperative. Three categories of acephalous civilizations were identified by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard. The first is consistent with what we have termed band societies, which are communities of 20–30 gatherer–hunters. As we discovered in Chapter 7's discussion of the Hadza. Life, Value: Economic Anthropology: These groups emphasise equality, collaboration, and sharing and are very egalitarian. Decisions are reached by consensus and discussion among people. Although official leadership positions do not exist, individuals possessing expertise and experience in specific fields may nevertheless have an impact in those fields. Social groupings frequently have to make judgements about how they will survive. Nomadic gatherer-hunter groups, for instance, had to choose where to camp and how long to stay there before moving on. Men may advise that it's time to move on, but the Hadza will not go "until the women are good and ready," according to anthropologist Frank Marlowe (Marlowe 2010, 40). Women are most suited to determine whether the area's food supplies have run out because they are the main gatherers. They decide it's time to shift camp when gathering food requires them to go too far. Every day, ladies who go out in social groups have to choose where to go and which resources to focus on. They do this by having a brief talk. The majority of individuals have encountered someone in their family or circle of acquaintances who enjoys giving advice to others and may even constantly desire to get their own way. This is true for a lot of tiny organisations. When someone attempts to provide advice to others among the Hadza, the others just ignore them. People may just relocate to a different camp in order to avoid the controlling individual if the issue continues. The Hadza have a general predisposition to shun or dismiss prospective authority figures, which is often greeted with resistance from both government officials and missionaries trying to give them instructions. A second kind of acephalous society organises leadership, decision-making, and dispute resolution through councils and/or extended family structures, whereas band societies lack any kind of governmental organisation at all. These were referred to as tribal societies by Elman Service in 1962. The "tribal" social structure of service is linked to subsistence practices like pastoralism and horticulture, where extended families manage particular resources like land or animals. These communities usually consist of several hundred to several thousand individuals, making them bigger than bands. A word of caution about the terms "tribe" and "tribal" Too frequently, especially in non-Western settings, the label "tribal" is applied to characterise disputes and group attachments that appear illogical. In nonWestern regions of the world, civil conflicts and guerrilla resistance are occasionally explained by Western media as the result of "ancient tribal hatred" between different populations. Tribes are associated with archaic lifestyles and collective groupthink. In actuality, a large number of modern disputes that are blamed on "tribal" hostility include groups that got along quite well before to the colonial era of European dominance. For example, before to colonisation, the pastoral Tutsi and horticulturist Hutu in Rwanda had cooperative relationships and symbiotic commerce. The majority-agrarian Hutu were resentful of the Belgians for providing the Tutsi with better educational opportunities and employment in colonial administration as part of their divide-and-rule policy of colonial supremacy. Group identities were inflexible and cemented in this competitive environment. The way these colonial practices fostered separation, prejudice, and competitiveness between these two groups is mainly responsible for the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Some anthropologists now refer to huge collectivities based on a feeling of shared culture and lineage as ethnic groups instead of tribes because the term has been so frequently abused. There are still a lot of anthropological texts that refer to a particular type of extended familybased sociopolitical organisation as "tribal." The phrase is also used by several Indigenous communities to describe their social groups. When someone refers to their own social group as their "tribe," it's one thing; when someone uses the same phrase to refer to a class of social organisation as a whole, it's quite another. Service's use of the term "tribal" to describe groups with a wide range of political structures meant that it was never a single, cohesive category. While some rely largely on councils or special groups, others employ both. Some rely on extended family systems to supply power and decision-making procedures. A collection of people connected by a common ancestor through either the paternal or maternal line is called a lineage, as you will discover in Chapter 11, Forming Family through Kinship. Communities in lineage orders are made up of two or more lineage groups, each of which has an elder or group of elders who are important in reaching decisions and resolving conflicts within the lineage. These leaders wield informal influence by their ability to convince other lineage members to follow their directions and their wealth of gathered knowledge, rather than holding official positions of leadership. Analogously to band cultures, lineage orders are often rather equal. Segmented lineages make up some lineage societies, such the Nuer people of South Sudan. These are made up of smaller groups known as minimum lineages, which are encircled by bigger groupings known as maximal lineages, which are encircled by yet larger groupings known as clans. Groups that may be traced down to a common great-grandfather are known as minimal lineages. Although there are no leaders in these bigger groupings of kin, individuals can find supporters in conflicts across minimum lineages by reaching out to these groups. The Nuer use their interconnected kin networks in this way to resolve disputes and preserve group cohesion. Evans-Pritchard (1940) characterises the Nuer people as passionately egalitarian and fiercely autonomous in his anthropological investigation. They shared with others in their kin groupings instead of hoarding money. But fighting was a regular occurrence. People used clubs or spears to fight in response to offences and disagreements since there were no official procedures in place for resolving disputes. The leopard-skin chief, so named because they wore leopard skins to signify their status, was a special mediator who was brought in when someone was slain, which was not unusual. Since these mediators held informal positions without the authority to impose their decisions or intimidate others, they could not be considered chiefs at all. Leopard-skin chiefs were revered as impartial parties since they were not related to any of the parties involved in the dispute. Their responsibility was to mediate a settlement between the offender and the victim's family in order to stop the violence from escalating and becoming retaliatory. Usually, the victim's family received recompense in the form of cattle over a number of years. The large man is another unofficial leadership position that is prevalent in Melanesia and New Guinean lineage-order cultures. Despite the egalitarian nature of lineage systems, a man might set himself apart via his ability to speak, accumulate riches, and engage in public deeds of charity. Big men, like leopard-skin chiefs, have no official position or authority to impose their will. They have persuasive rather than coercive power. Big men draw devoted followers who accept their authority and carry out their orders by sponsoring feasts and assisting young men with paying bride wealth. Large men mediate conflicts within communities and stand in for the local populace while interacting with strangers. Being a large man requires gaining riches and status, but what matters far more is the fair distribution of wealth and community duty. We detest selfishness and greed. An episode among the Kapauku of New Guinea, as reported by anthropologist Leopold Pospisil in 1963, included a man who refused to share resources with the less fortunate members of his group and was sentenced to death. Communities in certain acephalous civilizations are essentially structured around an age-based grouping system known as age sets. A community's age set is a collection of individuals with similar ages who have comparable social statuses and are allowed to participate in certain jobs, activities, and duties. A hierarchical age grade system that divides the community's members into children, youths, adults, and seniors may be created using a variety of age sets (the phrase "age set" refers to the group, while "age grade" refers to the level in the hierarchy). Age sets are often gendered, with male and female versions for each grade. Males and girls of comparable ages are called upon at different points during adolescence to be initiated into the adolescent age group, either as young men or as young ladies. Age groups help people build strong, enduring relationships that transcend clan and ancestry barriers within a community. Eight age groups, separated by around five years, are seen among the Shavante (or Xavante) of central Brazil (Flowers 1994; Maybury-Lewis 1967). Children are an undifferentiated collection of socially underdeveloped humans rather than being explicitly grouped by age. Boys who are seven to twelve years old move out of their family home and live in bachelor's huts. After around five years, the group of boys goes through a difficult series of rites that takes roughly a year to finish in order to be introduced into the age group of young warriors. Senior males provide valuable life skills to younger men in the lower age groups, teaching them how to hunt, sing, and conduct public rituals. Every evening, initiated men of various ages attend council meetings to discuss and deliberate on local issues. Girls have distinct age groups and customs related to initiation. For example, a woman receives her formal adult name in a public ceremony upon giving birth to her first child, marking her entry into the adult women's age group. Village democracy is a third, more unusual type of acephalous political organisation, in addition to bands and lineage orders. It is a common teaching point for Western students that the Greek city-state of Athens founded democracy. European colonisers of Africa believed they were introducing more progressive forms of governance to African nations because they saw themselves as the heirs of the classical political heritage. However, before the British arrived, the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria were already engaging in a very successful kind of indigenous democracy. In fact, a lot of anthropologists disagree that the Greeks founded democracy. Since most acephalous cultures do not have official rulers, they adopt democratic-style debate and consensus-building techniques. Indeed, the representational democracy of big Western cultures, dominated by powerful lobbyists and affluent campaign funders, may be substantially less democratic than the egalitarian and highly participatory kind of democracy seen in these societies. A variety of social groupings provide forums for open discourse and the expression of various interests and viewpoints in precolonial Igbo communities (Isichei 1978, 71–75). Every group got together often to talk about current affairs. Each lineage created a bigger group led by a lineage elder, and a nuclear family formed a group under the leadership of the father. Individuals were further subdivided into gendered age classes of persons around the same age, with women and men having their own groups. In many areas, a group of elderly ladies even conducted municipal inspections to ensure hygiene. A council of town elders made up of the heads of several organisations constituted the highest level. The community's elders would call a general town meeting that was attended by all members after conferring on a specific matter. Everyone was welcome to speak up at this gathering and express their opinions. The locals laughed and ignored the frivolous offerings, but they praised and applauded the good ones. At every level, the aim of group discussions was to arrive at an agreement. Leaders have no official authority to compel others to do anything. Group leaders' duties included facilitating the process of attaining consensus and serving as the discussion's chair. Similar public council decision-making processes have been documented by anthropologists in several civilizations worldwide, including local groups inside chiefdoms or states. The 1971 book Councils in Action was the product of a study group led by anthropologists Audrey Richards and Adam Kuper that compared and contrasted various council decision-making processes. In societies with centralised power, councils serve primarily as advisory forums, while in acephalous societies, they serve as the primary forum for public decision-making.