SOCIAL CONTROL
Humans, like other social group animals, are mostly controlled by emotions.
Social control is the influence to control humans in a society. It is exerted through public opinion, coercion (police, army), propaganda, laws, public state cults with state myth and priestly class, appeal to reason, and other methods.
Political Anthropology
Political Anthropology is the science of politics, regarding the homo sapiens. It observes the activities concerning decision making and conflict resolution in order to create and maintain social order and to cope with social disorder.
The anthropologist Elman Service devised a model to classify human societies.
NEED FOR SOCIAL CONTROL
Social solidarity is essential for the existence of society. This will work if we identify with the other.
No two persons are alike in nature by uniqueness of DNA. Every individual is a separate personality. There are differences among the individuals. Some worship an idol, others do not. Some eat meat, others are vegetarian. Some are orthodox, others are adaptive and modern. As a matter of fact society is a heterogeneous organisation. So there are variations and differences but a lot of people behave the same and people also copy each other rather quickly.
The aim of social control of a state is to keep the social order in place. The larger the society, the more complex it is to keep the state and its order together. Unity is often based on a common language, public state cult and mythology.
MAJOR MEANS OF CONTROL
a) Public state cults with state myth and priestly class.
This is a powerful tool used by all cult leaders who claim to be divine and act as mediators between the supernatural forces that rule the world and the people. To let the people believe this to be true, they create a mythology and brainwash people with it by creating a make believe world that is supported by all media available at that moment: amulets, books, statues, temples, speeches, processions, music, news outlets, large objects, movies, musicals, etc. We will show how this is done for Mesopotamia, Israel and Rome.
b) Law and coercion (police, army)
Laws defines rights, duties as well as the punishments for their violation. Laws also define sin and taboo often related to punishment depicted by the public state cults mythology.
Legitimacy
Legitimacy is the perception that an individual has a valid right to leadership. Historically, the right to rule has been based on various principles. In agricultural states such as ancient Mesopotamia, the Aztec, and the Inca, justification for the rule of particular individuals was based on hereditary succession and typically granted to the eldest son of the ruler.1
In most cases, supernatural cult beliefs were invoked to establish legitimacy and justify rule by an elite.
European monarchs invoked a divine right to rule that was reinforced by the Church of England in Britain, by the Roman Catholic Church and other churches prior to the French Revolution.
Louis XIV of France Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louvre collection, via Wikimedia Commons
The Bolshevik cult of Lenin (organized venerational worship) promised a worker’s paradise on earth and claimed legitimacy by being the revolutionary vanguard of this new world order.
When the Commissariat of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky introduced the propaganda of Leninism among children, it had two long-range goals: saturating children with Leninism to grow up loyal to the party Lenin personified; and to find a role model more powerful than their parents. 2
Adolf Hitler also claimed legitimacy by being the master of a new world order led by the myth of the racial pure Aryans in Nazi Germany.
Ehrentempel November 9 1935 on Königsplatz. The yearly held funeral reenactment of the 16 fallen martyrs myth during the Munich putsch attempt of 1923.
© Bavarian State Library Image Archive
Classification of societies
Elman Service circa 1937 during his time volunteering in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Republican Faction to fight against the Fascist General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Elman Service (Origins of the State and Civilization, 1975) 3 developed an influential scheme for categorizing the political character of societies: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state.
During most of the New-stone age (Neolithic) of Eurasia, people lived in small tribes composed of multiple bands. Most Neolithic societies were relatively simple and egalitarian. Generally states evolved in Eurasia only with the rise of metallurgy.
We have extended his scheme below:
Band
Tribe
Chiefdom
State
State French revolution
Size
< 100
100 – 5,000
5,000–20,000
> 20,000+
Social Organization
- Egalitarian informal leadership
- Segmentary society
- slavery
- Kinship-based leaders
- slavery
- Class-based hierarchy under oligarchy, king or emperor.
- Slavery
- 3rd estate has taken over
- Debating clubs, revolutionary committees, parliaments,
- balance of power
- Abolition of slavery
Economic Organization
- Nomadic hunter-gatherers
- farmers, herders
- Central accumulation and redistribution
- Some craft specialization
- Centralized bureaucracy
- Tribute based
- Taxation
- Laws
- Fulltime craft specializations
- Centralized bureaucracy
- Merit based
- Taxation
- Laws
- Fulltime craft specializations
Conflicts and War
Warfare is usually sporadic and short-lived
Raids by small groups
Mediation by chief, high-ranking warriors
Army led by divine king, emperor or oligarchy
Army led by revolutionary generals. After his putsch, led by Napoleon
Housing example
Housing
Temporary shelters
Villages of mud huts
Fortified centres
Fortified cities, roads
Cities, roads
Cult shrines
Cults
Carved figurines (between
-50,000 and -10,000)
Altar, Small shrines of worship, female figurines
Altar, Shrines of worship, female figurines
Temples with altar and large object/statue of worship
Separation between cults and state. Cult of first and second estate classes dissolved.
Monuments / buildings
Objects like burial mounds and Stone monuments
Large monuments
Palaces, public buildings
Revolutionary monuments, public buildings like hospitals
Historical age
Old stone age
New stone age / Neolithic
Bronze-, early iron-age
Iron-age
Modern age
Sources:
- PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Chapt. 7 POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON Paul McDowell, Santa Barbara City College.
https://perspectives.americananthro.org/ and https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/ ↩︎ - Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia by Nina Tumarkin,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1983 ↩︎ - Origins of the State and Civilization, The Process of Cultural Evolution,
Elman R. Service, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA, 1975 W. W. Norton ↩︎
