Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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not by a group of brothers [see Bromley 1981: 202–210] 71 ), a basically
communal complex society can well turn out not less homoarchic than even a
preindustrial state which in principle cannot be built up by a community matrix
as no community type presupposes administering by professionals (as well as
taxation – a specifically state’s way of getting means for paying those
specifically state’s administrators). The process of community leaders’
specialization in administration “from spare time to part time to full time” may
be launched only from outside the community – by the supracommunity
political institutions (Befu 1966).
One could doubt that the family size really affects the community’s
heterarchy on the following grounds. As is well known, there is a curvilinear
relationship between family size and cultural complexity: the small families are
more typical for both the most simple and most complex societies, whereas the
large extended ones are for the medium complexity societies (Nimkoff and
Middleton 1960; Osmond 1969; Blumberg and Winch 1972; McNett 1973;
Levinson and Malone 1980: 86–87; Ember, C. R. and Levinson 1991: 83).
However, the correlation between the number of levels of political hierarchy
above the community and the family size (considered as a proper and verifiable
criterion of a society’s cultural complexity level) turned out significantly
positive (a fast growth of the proportion of large extended families in relation to
small ones with the formation of the supracommunity levels) for simpler
societies (Bondarenko and Korotayev 2000c: table 3), whereas we got a
significant negative correlation for more complex ones (Ibid.: table 4). The
supposition that the family size influences the community’s heterarchy /
homoarchy not directly but through the factor of the very degree of
community’s complexity is also discredited by our results: the community’s
complexity and the family size affect the community’s heterarchy / homoarchy
rather independently (Ibid.: tables 19 – 22).
Similarly to the family size, polygyny affects the community’s
heterarchy negatively. In general, monogamous societies appear to have
democratic communities significantly more frequently than the polygynous
ones (Korotayev and Bondarenko 2000a: table 2). Like the family size, the
polygyny also significantly correlates with such indicators of cultural
complexity as the number of supracommunity levels and community /
settlement size (Ibid.: tables 3, 4). As it was with the family size, there are
grounds to maintain that polygyny is related to the community heterarchy
relatively independently from the factor of cultural complexity.
In general, the family structure (determined in its turn by a large
number of independent factors, both material, e.g. economic, and ideal, e.g.
religious) can affect significantly the overall socio-political type and
evolutionary trend of the respective societies. The family structure affects
primarily organization of the community through its associated socialization
practices (Ibid.: 197–201; see also Bondarenko and Korotayev 2000b) while, in