Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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cultural complexity). As has been emphasized in the previous sections, the
ancestor cult also determined such integrity-promoting phenomena as the
community’s collective landholding rights, the age-grade system, and the
nature of the suprafamily institutions of power.
Naturally, no integrative factors could eliminate the conflictprovoking
potential of the community completely. No doubt, foundations for
clashes were laid in its structural components and the principles of their
interaction. Bradbury (1973: 184) distinguished potential but, as he specifically
pointed out, rarely actualized lines of social split: between extended families
and the lineages associated with them – lateral branches founded by junior
members of the families, between extended families, and (in the villages with
two leaders) between the lineage of the onogie and other lineages. It seems that
the Binis themselves did not perceive the contradictions in the community as
insurmountable often sublimating them in the ritual sphere because in their
consciousness the social due had been brought to conformity with the must
with the end of social creation of the world associated with the establishment of
the Oba dynasty.
As Benin City had formed on the basis of a chiefdom – a homoarchic
union of agrarian extended-family-territorial communities, the city not only
inherited, but carried over the centuries and all the turbulence of history the
communal character of social organization and indivisibility of craft from
agriculture. The citizens belonged to these or those extended families and
communities, and practiced agriculture on their communities’ plots outside the
city boundaries alongside with crafts; in the city, possibly from the mid-15 th
century on (Ryder 1985: 385), 67 contrary to the hinterland, this or that
community had usually been specializing in one of the crafts for many
generations exchanging the produced articles on city markets, while supplying
the Oba and his court with articles of every craft was a strict hereditary duty
and privilege of definite city communities which had no right to trade in them.
All this is specifically reflected in the layout and architecture of Benin City (see
Onokerhoraye 1975: 304–305; Roese et al. 2001), that has been remaining
divided into community wards consisting of compounds inhabited by extended
families. Thus, social organization of the city turned out generally identical
with that of the village while this was also true with the structure of, and
relations in communities and extended families in Benin City and her nonurban
hinterland (for detail see Bondarenko 1991b; 1995a: 91–101, 117–124;
1995e; 1996e). 68 Naturally, the ideological pillars that supported the communal
social organization of the city were the same as in its agricultural hinterland
(Híjar 1972/1654: 249).
As it has been emphasized above, the Bini community was of the
generally homoarchic type, as it united kindred extended families (egbes)
organized just this way: with the only significant hierarchy within which senior
males unavoidably dominated in any social context. Historically, its formation