Part 2 Flashcards
What is political organization?
Formal and informal rules for how people have relationships to power
-Autonomous
•are the decision makers
•hold power over their own lives and decisions
-Situational
•give up some sense of power, where they might see others as valuable to make decisions for them because they have better expertise or knowledge
What is Permanent?
-when power is given as a permanent relationship over you
-limit to your own power
-always have power
Ex: state governments, status, wealth
What is ascribed status?
Not achieved, something you were born with/ inherit
Ex: clothes
-written texts
-burial sites/ goods
Most societies are usually in between ascribed and achieved
What is Egalitarian?
Equality in access, hunter gatherers, tend to be closer to achieved (your performance not inheritance)
Egalitarian vs Ranked societies
Egalitarian: no fixed number of opportunities or positions for people within that society
-everyone has the same access to better improve their lives
-purely equal access
-mostly hunter-gatherer societies
Autonomous
Ranked: limited number of positions and opportunities
-not everyone has access
-semi equal or not equal access
-society with fixed numbers of positions in opportunities
What are hunter gatherer social organizations?
-usually small populations(<100)
-family units make decisions and have autonomy
-nomadic, moving around a landscape
-Egalitarian
Religion: Animistic religion
-whale hunting example
-residentially mobile (your house moves)
-packing upnd moving from place to place throughout the year.
-usually to follow or intercept a resource such as caribou, seals, or whales
-follow food system
What is Animistic religion consist of?
-beliefs system that dictates your relationship with your environment
-everything has it’s own spirit or soul
-animals have the same rank as humans in the universe
-shamans: connect with spirit world, usually healers
-no diff between religious and secular spaces
What is a segmentary society?
-slighly larger population(up to a few 1000)
-autonomous but occasional pan tribal communities
-small scale farming
-residentally more sedentary(staying in one place longer)
-more organized religion/ rituals/ elders
-more elaborate mortuary
What are the two types of status?
Achieved and ascribed
What are chiefdoms?
-5,000-20,000+ populations
-two or more residential group with 1 chief in charge
-more defined social status (ascribed)
-centralized power (political and religious)
-craft specialization (we use this to define their social complexity
-agricultural
-more territorial
-monumental arch. (can be a reminder)
-metallurgy- metal tools
What is kiva?
Southwestern term for a ceremonial building used by ancestral puebloan people
What are state level societies?
• Generally > 20,000
• Restricted Class
Levels
• King/Emperor
• Taxes, Laws, Bureaucracy
• Urban/Frontier/Roads
• Pantheistic/Mono-theistic
• Palaces/Temples
