Transcript Chapter 12

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.
2.
3.
Extent to which political institutions are
distinct from other aspects of the social
structure.
Extent to which authority is
concentrated into specific political roles.
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) chiefdom
b) band
c) tribe
d) 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) bands
b) states
c) chiefdoms
d) 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 postapartheid 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 organization
b) Social order
c) Gender stratification
d) 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?