Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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its turn, the latter is able to influence significantly the mode the
supracommunity levels are shaped. Hence, one would expect reasonably
(Korotayev and Bondarenko 2000a: tables 9, 10) to find a significant negative
correlation not only between polygyny and family size, on the one hand, and
the degree of community’s heterarchy, on the other, but also with the measure
of heterarchy of the highest level of political structure.
The typical ways of communities’ integration also tend to differ in the
cases of homoarchic and heterarchic complex societies. This way is forcible
more often than not at the homoarchic societies, like chiefdoms and states,
formation, usually in the result of subduing of the weaker communities (or
other local units) by the stronger ones. Contrary to this, heterarchic sociopolitical
complexity arises as an outcome of volunteer and (more or less)
equitable joining up of local components, i.e., by way of synoecism
(Bondarenko 2000c: 215–216). The classical examples of this pathway are
provided by the socio-political history of the Greek poleis in Antiquity, the
Swiss Confederation in the Middle Ages, and the United States of America in
Modern Time.
Thus, the heterarchy – homoarchy dichotomy rooted in the diversity of
family and community types finds further development in the societies that
enjoy supracommunity levels of socio-political integration, predetermining to a
considerable degree the non-unilinear and alternative nature of the socioevolutionary
process in the world-wide scale. Indeed, the aforesaid does not
mean the community’s disappearance: the state ripens out and exists for a long
time not within the community but on the joint of communities – in the
intercommunity relations (as a rule, mediated by the relations between
associations of communities – chiefdoms, tribes and so forth) and eventually,
having formed, towers above them (see chapter 4, section 2). The same is true
with such other basically non-state social units as, for example, lineages.
However, within the state structure they, being in essence non-bureaucratic (as
well as communities) cannot and do not form the matrix for the uppermost level
institutions’ building up as lineage norms (loyalty to lineage members) are
incompatible with state norms (Fallers 1956: 12 f, 277 f; see also, e.g., Lewis’s
[1965: 100] compressed but instructive characteristics of the Zulu and
Southeast Chinese socio-political systems based on works by Gluckman
[1987/1940] and Freedman [1958] respectively). The strength of the lineage
organization may serve as a testimony of weakness of state control in a state’s
frontier regions (Potter, J. M. 1970: 130–138), or, thus in other cases, of a
society’s non-state status.
As for communities, they usually decay only in the process of the
wider society’s transition to capitalism (as well as early institutions of kinship
[Parsons 1960; 1966]). Examples of the community’s disappearance in
agricultural societies are seldom, Egypt from the Middle Kingdom on being the
most prominent one (Diakonoff et al. 1989: I, 143; Diakonoff and Jakobson