Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

84
The Bini community’s overall homoarchic nature (reflected
specifically in unequivocal dominance of senior men and men in general), its
administrative system and the foundations of interaction with the
supracommunity institutions have been described in the previous chapters and
sections. In the present section the community’s internal social structure and
relations will be characterized in some detail, and the factors and mechanisms
of the community’s integration (mostly other than administrative, already
discussed above) will be pointed out with the special emphasis laid on
generally homoarchy-orienting encompassing importance of all this for the
whole complex (in fact, supercomplex – more complex than middle-range)
society.
Charles Maisels (1987; 1993) stresses that in what he calls “citystates”,
opposite to territorial “village-states” (see also Diakonoff and Jakobson
1982; Izard 1992: 14–16; Trigger 1993: 8–14 et passim; 2003: 92–119, 266–
270, 665 et passim), not broad descent groups (such as sibs/clans) but lineagebased
extended families (households) 60 were the basic mode of social
organization. Though the city-state both as concept and term (see further:
Burke 1986; Hansen 2000; Glassner 2004) seems to me unacceptable with
respect to Benin (Bondarenko 1995a: 95), the latter definitely was a society of
the very type Maisels and Trigger designated that way. However, there is
significant difference between two subtypes of cultures falling under this
category. The first of them is represented by the societies in which typical
household and community were based on nuclear families (e.g., the Greek
poleis) while the second subtype, and Benin is a good example at this point, is
formed by those early urban societies in which community comprised
households each of which was an extended family with lineages (not sibs/clans)
as their cores. 61 Particularly, I have shown elsewhere that in Benin not nuclear
but extended family (organized as household integrating a number of patrilineal
kindred nuclear families) was the economic and socio-cultural background of
the community, just the extended family was recognized as the smallest selfsufficient
social unit (Bondarenko 1995a: 136–139; Bondarenko and Korotayev
2000c: 174–176). Indeed, what unites both of the subtypes is that their core
social institution is the household-based community of this or that type 62 but
while the nuclear-family-based community is essentially predominantly nonkin,
the extended-family-based one preserves in itself unilineal descent ties.
Indeed, the bonds of unilineal (patrilineal) descent embrace all the Binis and are
very important in their traditional culture’s context (Bradbury 1973: 157–170).
A useful division can be established within the extended-family
households either: between those integrating monogamous and polygynous
kindred nuclear families. In Benin polygyny was a norm (Dapper 1975/1668:
162; Gallwey 1893: 129; Thomas, N. W. 1910a: I, 15; Ajisafe 1945: 40;
Mercier 1962: 299–303; Ryder 1969: 313; Ahanmisi 1992; Eweka, I. 1998:
161–162) supported by public morality and recognized as a sign of man’s