Form of sociopolitical organization usually based on horticulture or pastoralism. Socioeconomic stratification and centralized rule are absent and there are no means of enforcing political decisions.
What is a tribe?
100
Iranian pastoral nomadic tribes that graze their animals at 17,000 feet above sea level and tightly coordinated the use of pasture land among different tribes.
What is the Basseri and the Qashqai?
100
Labels that Elman Service gave to four types, or levels, of political organization: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state.
What is sociopolitical typology?
200
Various positions that people occupy in society that people have little or no choice about occupying.
What is ascribed status?
200
Complex sociopolitical system that administers a territory and populace with substantial contrast in occupation, wealth, prestige, and power. It has an independent centrally organized political unit, a government.
What is a nation-state?
200
Europe fell back to this form of political and economic system after the fall of the Roman empire.
What is chiefdoms?
200
Obligatory sharing with kin that chiefs express through sponsoring feasts at which they gave back much of what they had received.
What is chiefly redistribution?
300
A group uniting all men or women born during a certain time span.
What is age set?
300
Form of sociopolitical organization that falls between the tribe and the state; kin-based with differential access to resources and a permanent political structure.
What is a chiefdom?
300
Primary areas in which chiefdoms developed.
What is circum-Caribbean, lowland Amazonia, southeastern U.S. and Polynesia?
300
An individual who does not hold an official office, but helps regulate regional affairs and builds reputation through entrepreneurship, generosity and other personal characteristics. Neither is wealth or position passes to his heirs.
What is a big man?
400
Statuses that people occupy in society that come through choices, actions, efforts, talents, or accomplishments and may be positive or negative.
What is achieved status?
400
A name for how resources are distributed in chiefdoms and states.
What is differential access?
400
A tribal society of about 26,000 people who live in Venezuela and Brazil and whose lives have been threatened by mining practices, disease, and external attacks.
What is the Yanomami?
400
A leadership position that holds limited actual authority and who leads by example and persuasion.
What is a village head?
500
An upward or downward change in a person's social status.
What is vertical mobility?
500
Four particular aspects of states.
What is population control, judiciary, enforcement, and fiscal?
500
A group that likely descended from herders and who were pushed into the Kalahari desert by poverty or oppression. The group now tends cattle for Bantu individuals and have domesticated animals.
What is the Basarwa San?
500
Local groups that are linked in ways other than kinship, often based on common age or gender and that extend across a whole tribe and even span several villages.