Lecture: Political Organization, Power, and Inequality
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 7
Opening
Picture a campus hiking club with 30 members. The members elected their president by a show of hands. Before a trail cleanup, she tells 12 volunteers where to stand, and they go. Now picture one member who blocks the supply closet until everyone agrees to his plan. He moves the group too. But nobody thinks he has the right, and the next week they talk about him behind his back.
Two people moved the same group, and the group treated them very differently. That difference is what this lecture is about. You'll meet it in many places. A business major will one day manage a team and wonder why some directions land and others don't. A social-work student may help two neighbors settle a quarrel. And anyone in a student club has watched people decide who gets to make the calls.
Here's where we are. Week 1 gave you the anthropological perspective, and Week 2 gave you culture, norms, and symbols. Week 3 taught two-column field notes at the course's illustrative farmers' market, and Week 4 heard the vendors' own words, including "the bell." Week 5 asked how people get their food. Week 6 sorted the ways goods move, and it ended with redistribution, goods collected at a center and given out again. That left a question hanging. Who has the right to run the center?
Here's the plan. I'll start with power, authority, and legitimacy. Then we'll use two classroom models for comparing whole societies. After that we'll look at how groups keep order and settle disputes. We'll finish back at the market, with its manager, its vendors' association, and its bell. Next, in Week 8, the Midterm Review and Exam, the course looks back over everything so far.
1. Power, authority, and legitimacy
Think about two people who can change your plans. A referee can stop a game and send a player off. A loud stranger can block a hallway until you walk around. Both make you act. Only one has a right to do it that everyone in the game accepts.
The course uses three linked terms for that difference. Power is the ability to make others act, even against their will, whether or not they accept it as rightful. Authority is power that people accept as rightful, such as an elected officer's right to make decisions for a group. And legitimacy is people's acceptance that a use of power is rightful; legitimacy is what turns power into authority.
Back to the hiking club. The president used power when she sent 12 volunteers to their places. The member at the closet used power too. The difference is that the club elected her, so the members accept her direction as rightful. Her power is authority, and the election is the source of its legitimacy. The member at the closet had power without authority.
Authority doesn't always need a title. Picture a busy restaurant kitchen. The head cook has the official title. But when the dinner rush hits, the line cooks turn to a dishwasher who has worked there for 9 years and knows where everything is. They follow her because they respect her. That respect is a kind of legitimacy. It gives her influence, a softer kind of authority that rests on trust rather than an office.
One more word belongs here. Political organization is the way a group arranges leadership, decision-making, and the keeping of order among its members. A club has one. So does a kitchen, a village, or a country.
Pause and try this. A coach the team chose makes everyone run laps, and nobody complains. Is that power, authority, or both?
Ask whether the team accepts the coach's right to decide.
Here's the answer. Both. The coach makes people act, which is power, and the team accepts it as rightful, so that power is authority.
Here's the wrong turn to avoid. Students often treat power and authority as synonyms. They aren't. Authority is power plus acceptance, and legitimacy is the acceptance.
2. Band, tribe, chiefdom, and state
Now let's widen the lens from a club to whole societies. Think about how decisions get made in groups of different sizes. A few friends planning a camping trip talk it over, and whoever knows the trail leads. A large city runs on elected officials, written laws, and a police force. Both are ways of deciding. The tools are different.
Anthropologists compare those tools with a classroom model associated with Service, whose 1962 book was titled Primitive Social Organization. That title uses the period's wording, which this course quotes only as a title and never uses in its own voice. The model has four types.
A band is a small, mobile group whose leaders guide by influence rather than by holding an office. A tribe is villages linked by kin groups or associations, with leaders who cannot force others to obey. A chiefdom is a hereditary office that holds authority over several communities, often with redistribution through the chief. And a state is a society with a central government that has the power to tax, make law, and enforce it.
Let me give you a picture for each, made up for this course and describing no real people. A group of about 30 people moves camp several times a year, and they follow whoever knows the ground best. That's a band. Several villages are tied by kin groups, and a respected elder speaks at gatherings but can't make anyone obey. That's a tribe. One office passes from parent to child, oversees 5 communities, and collects part of each harvest to give out again at feasts. That's a chiefdom. And a central government that taxes, writes laws, and keeps courts and police is a state.
Now the most important sentence in this section. These four types are a model for comparing, never a ladder of progress. No type is earlier, simpler, or better than another. Real communities mix features, and the model never places a present-day community on a path.
Pause and try this. One leader holds a hereditary office over several communities and gives out goods at feasts, but there's no central government that taxes. Which type is that?
Look for the office and its reach.
Here's the answer. A chiefdom. A hereditary office over several communities, often with redistribution, marks a chiefdom, and without a central government that taxes, makes law, and enforces it, it isn't a state.
That answer also cures a second wrong turn. A chiefdom is not a small state. The difference is the kind of leadership, not size. And a state isn't more advanced than a band. They're different arrangements.
3. Egalitarian, rank, and stratified societies
Here's a second model, and it asks a different question. Think about a pickup basketball game at a park. Anyone who plays well can end up calling the plays, and the next day someone else might. Now think about a club with 1 president's seat and 5 members who want it. Only one can hold it at a time.
Those two settings differ in how many places of honor there are for the people able to fill them. Fried, in a 1967 book called The Evolution of Political Society, used that difference, and a second one about resources, to compare whole societies.
An egalitarian society is a society with as many positions of prestige as people able to fill them, so people of the same age and gender have equal access to prestige and resources. A rank society is a society with fewer positions of prestige than people able to fill them, so prestige is unequal even where access to basic resources is not. And a stratified society is a society in which people have unequal access to basic resources, such as land or the means to make a living.
So the pickup game sounds egalitarian. The club with 1 seat sounds like rank, because 4 of the 5 willing members can't hold it this year, yet they all still use the same meeting room. And imagine a farming town where a few families own all the farmland, and everyone else must rent land or work for them. That's the stratified picture, because a basic resource is unequally held.
Remember that these everyday settings are only anchors. Fried's scheme describes whole societies, and the course teaches it as a model.
Pause and try this. In one setting, honors are limited but everyone can still use the land. Is that rank or stratified?
Ask which thing is unequal, prestige or resources.
Here's the answer. Rank. Prestige is limited, but access to the basic resource is equal, and stratified means unequal access to basic resources.
The wrong turn here is reading egalitarian as "everyone is the same." It means equal access to prestige and resources for people of the same age and gender. People still differ in skill, age, and role.
4. Social control and law
Let's go back to that pickup game. There's no referee and no rulebook. Yet the players keep order. A player who calls too many fouls gets teased. Others talk about him on the walk home. Next week, nobody picks him for a team.
That's social control. Social control is the ways a group keeps its members within its rules: informal means such as gossip, ridicule, shunning, and the threat of supernatural sanction, and formal law. Gossip is talk about a person behind their back. Ridicule is teasing or mocking. Shunning is leaving a person out. And the threat of supernatural sanction is the belief that unseen powers will punish a wrongdoer.
Law is formal social control: rules that a recognized authority makes and enforces, with set consequences for breaking them. Picture the park's posted closing time, enforced with a fine by the city. That's law.
So the park has four ways of keeping order in our story. The teasing is ridicule, the talk is gossip, and being left out is shunning. Only the closing time is law. That means 3 of the 4 are informal, and only 1 is law.
Pause and try this. A group chat goes quiet every time one member posts, and nobody replies to him for a week. Which form of social control is that?
Ask what the group is doing to him.
Here's the answer. Shunning. The group is leaving him out, which is an informal means of social control.
The wrong turn here is thinking law is the only form of social control. Gossip, ridicule, shunning, and the threat of supernatural sanction keep order in every group, including groups that also have law.
5. Settling disputes
Picture two neighbors who share a fence. A storm knocks it down, and the repair costs 600 dollars. Each thinks the other should pay more. Their neighborhood association has a volunteer who helps with disputes, and a board that can rule on shared property.
Dispute resolution is the ways people settle a disagreement, which this course groups into three routes. Negotiation is a route of dispute resolution in which the parties settle the disagreement themselves, with no third party. Mediation is a route in which a third party helps the parties reach their own agreement but does not decide for them. And adjudication is a route in which a third party hears the sides and decides the outcome.
Here's the fence three ways. If the neighbors talk it over and split the cost, 300 dollars each, that's negotiation. If the volunteer sits with them and asks questions until they agree, that's mediation. If the board hears both sides and rules on the split, that's adjudication. The question that sorts them is always the same. Who made the final decision?
People have built many forms of dispute resolution. Early twentieth-century accounts describe Inuit communities in parts of the Arctic settling some disputes through public song contests, judged by the audience. The older outsiders' label for Inuit, "Eskimo," is given here once as the historical term. A public song contest is a documented form of dispute settlement in which, according to early twentieth-century accounts, Inuit communities in parts of the Arctic settled some disputes through songs performed before an audience that judged them. Notice the past tense and the time of the accounts. Inuit are a living people who speak for themselves, and their ways have changed, as every community's have.
Pause and try this. Two roommates argue about the thermostat, and a friend helps them talk until they find a deal they both accept. Which route is that?
Ask who made the final decision.
Here's the answer. Mediation. The friend helped, but the roommates decided for themselves.
The wrong turn here is thinking every dispute needs a court to be settled for real. Negotiation and mediation settle many disputes with no one deciding for the parties.
6. The market's governance
Now let's walk back into the running fieldwork site before opening time. It's the course's illustrative, unnamed neighborhood farmers' market, made up for teaching, with 24 stalls. The market manager assigns stall locations, collects a weekly stall fee, and rings the opening bell. And the vendors' association votes on the market's rules.
Read it with this week's tools. The manager's stall assignments make each vendor set up where the manager says. That's power. Vendors accept the assignments and the fee as rightful, so that power is authority. And the association's vote on the rules is where that acceptance, the legitimacy, comes from.
Now the bell. Field-note entry 3, at 8:00 in the morning, records the manager ringing a hand bell. Vendors call out "Bell's rung!" and the first sales begin within a minute. Entry 1, at 7:40, records that no money changes hands, though two shoppers are already waiting. What keeps that rule? In the course's illustrative interview, a vendor says, "You sell before the bell, people talk." Gossip, not a fine, keeps the rule.
Let's count. Of the 10 field-note entries, 2 show the manager acting. Entry 3 is the bell, and entry 9, at 9:20, is the manager loading the "Pantry" crate into a van. Two out of 10 is 20 percent. And Week 6's tally coded 4 of the market's 50 exchanges as redistribution, unsold goods pooled in that crate and passed on by the manager. Four out of 50 is 8 percent. Every one of those 4 ran through the person with authority.
Pause and try this. Two vendors disagree about bagging a regular's order before the bell, and the vendors' association settles it by a vote. Which route is that?
Ask who decides.
Here's the answer. Adjudication. A third party, the association, hears the sides and decides the outcome.
The field notes don't record how that dispute really ended, so every route is an illustrative possibility. And one caution. The market manager isn't a chief, and the market isn't a chiefdom. Service's types describe whole societies. The manager holds a job at one market, not a hereditary office over several communities.
Here's the reading in plain words. The manager holds authority, not only power, because the vendors accept rules their own association votes on. The bell signals the rule, gossip enforces it between visits, and the "Pantry" crate runs through the person with the authority to collect and give out.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Power is the ability to make others act, and authority is power people accept as rightful. Legitimacy is the acceptance that turns one into the other. Band, tribe, chiefdom, and state are a model for comparing leadership, never a ladder. Fried's scheme asks whether access to prestige and to basic resources is equal. Gossip, ridicule, shunning, and the threat of supernatural sanction keep order alongside law. Negotiation, mediation, and adjudication differ in who decides. And at the market, authority rests on the vendors' own vote.
Next in this module, read Chapter 7 if you haven't yet, then open the slide deck and the Readings & Resources page, work through the lecture tutorial and the practice set, and take the quiz. Next week, Week 8, the Midterm Review and Exam, looks back over Weeks 1 to 7 and asks how anthropology's own ideas about culture changed.
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