Week 7 — Political Organization, Power, and Inequality

Welcome to your Week 7 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A business major who will one day manage a team and a social-work student who helps neighbors settle a dispute both ask this week's question: why do people follow some people and not others?

In plain language

Every group of people has to decide who makes the calls and how order is kept. Anthropologists call those arrangements political organization (the way a group arranges leadership, decision-making, and keeping order). This week you will learn to tell power (making others act) from authority (power people accept as rightful). You will meet two classroom models for comparing groups, and you will see how people keep each other in line and settle disputes, with or without a court. By the end, you will be able to read who holds authority in a setting you know and say where that authority comes from.

• Already covered: Weeks 1 to 6 gave you the perspective, culture, fieldwork, language, making a living, and exchange.
• This week: power and authority, two models for comparing groups, social control, and disputes.
• How they connect: Week 6's redistribution needs someone with authority to run the center.
• Where we're going next: Week 8, the Midterm Review and Exam.

Focus

Who makes people act, and when do people accept it as rightful?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] tell power from authority and name the legitimacy between them
• [ ] use band, tribe, chiefdom, and state as a model, never a ladder
• [ ] name informal social control and tell mediation from adjudication
• [ ] read the market's governance and its redistribution share

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 7 (about 30 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Ethnography Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: explain why authority is more than power.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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