10 - Seeking and keeping power in Bunyoro-Kitara, Uganda

Summary

Archaeologists have long been interested in the process of state formation. However, attention has recently shifted towards investigation of lower levels of political complexity, particularly chiefdoms. The publication of a recent School of American Research seminar (Earle 1991b) and other research on chiefdoms (summarized by Earle 1987) has led to a fairly radical reinterpretation of our understanding of such “intermediate-level” societies. The functionalist notion that chiefs managed the distribution of resources has been replaced by a realization that chiefs were rather more selfish individuals out to extract a surplus from their followers, who in turn could curb the more despotic tendencies of their leaders by threatening to shift their allegiances elsewhere. This description, albeit superficial, reflects the central role given in recent work to discussion of how chiefs acquired and retained power, the essential components of which were control of the economy, war, and ideology (Earle 1991a: 9).

Chiefdoms are usually viewed in evolutionary models of state formation as the immediate precursors of states. These models have been the subject of a spirited attack by Yoffee (1993). He, interalia, points out the dangers inherent in subverting a taxonomy of recent societies into an evolutionary scheme whereby contemporary chiefdoms, for example, are viewed as representative of the historical precursors of states, allowing archaeologists to flesh out flimsy data with borrowed ethnographic detail. Yoffee (1993) has also cogently argued that states do not normally evolve from chiefdoms. Instead, states may arise from the competition among different nodes of power (economic, political, and ideological) within a society. In fact, successful chiefdoms would appear to be inimical to the development of states.