Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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IV
Was Benin a Suprakin Based Society?
1. Anthropological theory: kin vs. territory, biological vs. social
By mentioning with respect to Benin the community matrix, the kin character
of central for the society religious beliefs (and at the same time ideology) – the
ancestor cult, etc. we come to one more aspect of the problem of the state
which is, consciously or not, often evicted from many contemporary definitions
due to the wide-spread approach to the state as merely a specific set of political
institutions 44 (as well as to cultures in comparison with which the state is
defined; e.g., Timothy Earle [1991: 14] postulates unequivocally that
“… chiefdoms must be understood as political systems”). This aspect,
intrinsically interdependent with the problem of bureaucracy, is coming to the
fore of the non-kin, territorial relations in the state society.
It is important even more so because of its high relevance for this
work’s most general theoretical scope: I presume that homoarchic and
heterarchic societies (at least preindustrial) typically differ in the correlation of
kin and territorial lines in their organization (e.g., Bondarenko 2000c: 215;
2001: 256–257; 2004b: 47–48). It can further be suggested that this distinction
is in its turn connected with the type of the community, the universal
substratum social institution, which is dominant. The extended-family
community in which dominant vertical social ties are vividly expressed, being
given the shape of kinship relations with the division of relatives into elder and
younger as most important, is more peculiar to homoarchic societies. And
generally characteristic of heterarchic societies is the territorial community in
which dominant social ties are horizontal and apprehended in the first place as
neighborhood ties among those equal in rights. I will elaborate on this point in
some detail in the closing chapter.
The “kin vs. territory” problem is intrinsically related to that of
correlation of biological and social in the phenomenon of kinship. Morgan
(1877) contrasted the kin-based society (societas) to territory-based (civitas) as
the one underpinned by primordial “natural” ties to the one formed by, in this
sense, artificial ties. Thus, he recognized kinship as a direct projection of real
biological relations on the social sphere. However, in the 20 th century several
generations of anthropologists, contrary to Morgan, recognized kinship as
having social substance independent of biological and, even more so, as a
social phenomenon par excellance (see, e.g., Lowie 1948; Lйvi-Strauss 1949;