Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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representation of a power heterarchy” (Crumley 1995: 3; emphasis in the
original; see also Vliet 2003) nevertheless must not be identified and confused
with heterarchy as social system: in particular, the unavoidably heterarchic
polis social framework admitted not only democratic but also viable aristocratic
and oligarchic political forms. Bouzek (1990: 172) is right both in his irony
about endless academic debates and in representation of the Greeks’ own
distinction between their polis and other peoples’ states: “The Greeks had fewer
problems than we have with the definition of the state. They saw kingdoms and
kings in all parts of the world where they met one ruler, and not the council of a
polis or ethnos”. However, in the anthropological perspective the problem with
attribution of the polis as state is not in the fact that typically it is not a
monarchy (indeed, we do know a great number of republican states, for
example, modern) but in the fact that the Greek polis (on the contrary to the
Roman civitas at transition from Republic to Empire [Hopkins 1968;
Shtaerman 1989; Blois 1994]) never gave rise to bureaucracy which (besides
many other deeds) could have divided the polity’s territory arbitrarily, ignoring
the natural division that had resulted from local communities’ synoecism as not
only the historically first but also most frequent means for the polis’ very
formation (e.g., Andreev 1976; 1979; 2002: 776–783; Snodgrass 1980; Frolov
1988; Luce 1998). Even Cleisthenes who in the last decade of the 6 th century
BC changed radically the Athens’ general administrative system struck the
blow not on local communities but on the four archaic philai which were tribes
(Marinovich and Koshelenko 1996: 15). Furthermore, for Greeks the polis was
not a political or territorial unit first and foremost but a self-governing (i.e.,
never bureaucracy-governed even in theory!) collectivity of equal in rights
citizens (e.g., Finley 1963: 56; 1982: 3–4; Hansen 1991: 58–59; Strogetskij
1995). Attempts to avoid these facts and substantiate the viewpoint at the polis
as a “non-bureaucratic state” (e.g., Vliet 1987; 1994; 2003; 2005; Hansen 2002;
Grinin 2004a 73 ) seem to contradict the well-grounded idea of the state’s
intimate relatedness to the presence of bureaucracy.
In the meantime, the recognition of the polis as a non-state system
should not lead to the conclusion that the state cannot be democratic or nonmonarchical
(what, for example, Grinin [2004a] actually erroneously equates
with democracy). First, at least today in many countries, mainly in the West
but not only there, one can observe both democracy and bureaucracy. Second,
though it goes without saying that monarchy is the most wide-spread form of
political regime in preindustrial state societies, especially in early states or
civilizations (see Claessen 1978: 535–596; Trigger 2003: 71–91, 264), history
has seen instances of non-monarchical bureaucracies yet in ancient and
medieval times. For example, in oligarchic Venice from 1297 and till
Napoleon’s occupation in 1797 Great Council consisting of adult males of
specified elite families selected and elected among its members functionaries
including the head of polity (doge) without any feedback from the populace. In