Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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in the late 1 st millennium BC – early 1 st millennium AD marked the radical
change in the type of subsistence and turned out the initial step on the way to
the Benin Kingdom’s appearance (see Bondarenko and Roese 1998).
Anthropologically, community served as the model, a kind of pattern according
to which the supracommunity levels were built up homoarchically too, though
the transition to higher levels of socio-political organization was accompanied
by significant changes (Bondarenko 1995a; 2001). Precisely the community
was not only the focus of the Benin complex society by which it was
“modeled”, but also the core of the whole universe in the Binis’ outlook (see
Bondarenko 1995a: 24–89; 1997b). The complex society’s integrity was
guaranteed by principally the same various mechanisms as that of the
community; ideologically, this part was played by ancestor cult first and
foremost which ascribed legitimacy to political institutions from the society’s
bottom to top (see Bondarenko 1995a: 176–181). Collectivist, hierarchyoriented
dominant features of communalists’ thinking, consciousness,
Weltanschauung were adequate to, and critically supportive for, the terms and
conditions of life in it. Treating multiple in Benin art compositions with the
Oba in the center flanked by dignitaries depicted smaller than the sovereign as
“a classic hierarchical composition”, Herbert Cole (1981: 12) rightly pointed
out “… its great value in Benin thought, not only as a socio-political statement,
but as a spiritual, mythic, and psychological metaphor as well.”
Thus, in Benin not the supracommunity institutions were reshaping the
community (what is typical of states) but vice versa: they were becoming
similar to it. What follows from all the aforesaid is the community’s key role
in determination of the character of the mental-cultural, socio-economic, and
governmental subsystems of the society. 69 The clue to many truly and already
pseudo-, quasicommunal traits and features of the 13 th – 19 th centuries Benin
society is contained in the aforesaid, too. In particular, the mental aims of the
Bini did not at all prevent from social stratification both in a community and in
the wider Benin society opposing only to the destruction of their background,
i.e., to destabilizing of the society and whole universe. Owing to it precolonial
Benin never saw private ownership for the means of production (the arable land
first and foremost), class-and-estate stratification, doubts in the supreme ruler’s
sacrality and so on and so forth. However, if the community’s integrity and
socio-cultural background were provided, the picture of the universe and
consciousness of the Bini to some extend even demanded their internal
stratification because any integrity (including social) was seen as not
homogeneous but hierarchically structured (Bondarenko 1995a). The specifics
of the position of titled chiefs and the sovereign clearly witnesses to the kin
communal principles’ primary importance for the shaping of the political
system and institutions. So, as the fundamental, basic socio-cultural, political,
and economic institution, the extended-family-territorial agricultural
community fastened all the taxonomic levels of the Kingdom’s homoarchic