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The Political Relation of the Village to the State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Harumi Befu
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Extract

Almost everywhere in the world man lives in communities, and a vast majority of these communities are not independent political entities but are subject to political control from above. When village communities are under the control of a central authority, there necessarily arises the problem of working out a political relationship between the local communities and the central authority. This relationship is, of course, far from uniform. The modest state of the aboriginal Fiji, where the ruler has little more power than to demand tributes, is a far cry from the modern state of Communist China, which controls practically every sphere of peasant life. A question arises then as to what determines the variation in the political relationships between the village community and the central authority and within the village's internal political structure. The purpose of this article is to explore these determinants and examine their consequences for the village community as a political entity.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , July 1967 , pp. 601 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1967

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31 This is a point Karl Wittfogel makes in his Oriental Despotism (New Haven 1957), 119.Google Scholar

32 I differ with Fallers (“African Cultivators,” 109) and Service (Primitive Social Organization, 175) in this regard. Both these writers tend to see what I have called the primitive state and the classical state to be essentially the same. Fallers, in particular, considers the village-state relationship in pagan Africa and in civilizational Europe and Asia to be quite alike.

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39 Governments following the model of the West attempt to introduce self-government institutions in the village, requiring village officials to be elected by villagers and rules and regulations to be decided by vote. These attempts should not lead us to believe that there is fundamental political autonomy at the village level. The semblance of autonomy is actually something imposed on villages from the central government, and the sphere of life in which the village government can exercise control is rather rigidly circumscribed. Thus what is remarkable about self-government in villages of modern states is the extent to which they lack basic autonomy, a point well illustrated by Fraser (pp. 108–9) m discussing Malay village organization.

40 See Wittfogel, 122–26.

41 P. 180.

42 Clifford Geertz, “Studies in Peasant Life,” in Siegel, Biennial Review, 6.

43 See Anderson and Anderson for an example from France.