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The Segmentary State in Africa and AsiaAuthor(s): Aidan SouthallReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), pp. 52-82Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/179022 .Accessed: 26/11/2011 00:33

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The Segmentary State in Africa and Asia AIDAN SOUTHALL

University of Wisconsin, Madison

THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES

Segmentary state was the concept coined to fit Alur society into the theory of political anthropology of the 1940s.1 Fortes and Evans-Pritchard made the first giant step in the comparative analysis of African political systems, but supposedly centralized states and stateless segmentary lineage systems were the only ones to receive full consideration.2 Nadel had already distilled the voluminous Eurocentric literature on the theory and philosophy of the state, overburdened as it was with Hegelian growth, to produce a precise em- pirically oriented and workable definition of the state for anthropologists.3 Alur society did not fit or even approximate anywhere within the range of the model provided. But the model formulated in 1956 under Alur inspiration was an awkward and cumbersome derivation of Nadel's rather than a clear model in its own right. It would be simpler and better to define the segmentary state as one in which the spheres of ritual suzerainty4 and political sovereignty do not coincide. The former extends widely towards a flexible, changing periph- ery. The latter is confined to the central, core domain.

Having formulated the model, I proceeded to argue that many other histor- ically well known polities in other continents were also segmentary rather than unitary states. I subsequently felt that perhaps the net had been spread too widely. But had it not been, the point would probably never have been

I wish to express my gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for awarding me a fellowship that enabled me to do further work on this topic, and to many others for intellectual and moral assistance and encouragement, especially Burton Stein, John Middleton, Richard Fox, and Allen Zagarell.

1 This and all subsequent references to the Alur and their neighboring peoples involve infor- mation abridged from Aidan Southall, Alur Society: A Study in Processes and Types of Domina- tion (Cambridge: Heffer, 1956; and Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1972), supplemented by later visits and discussions with members of Alur society, to whom I am, as always, most deeply grateful.

2 African Political Systems, Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, eds. (London: Oxford University Press, 1940).

3 S. F. Nadel, A Black Byzantium (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 69. 4 This usage is supported by Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire du XIXe. Siecle, Vol. XIV

(Paris, 1875), despite the historical feudal emphasis of European thought.

0010-4175/88/1304-4148 $5.00 ? 1988 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 53

noticed. I was surprised as well as complimented when Richard Fox applied my model in detail to the Rajput polities he had studied in northern India.5 When the distinguished historian Burton Stein applied it to the medieval Colas of South India, to their predecessors the Pallavas, and even to the succeeding empire of Vijayanagara, surprise became astonishment.6 The best way to repay such a compliment is to reverse it, reformulating my own idea by learning from Stein's refinement of the model for India.

Few of Burton Stein's Indianist colleagues were either pleased or compli- mented by his picking a theory from the "African bush" and applying it to the high civilization of India. Their cultural and regional prejudices were exposed. It is all right to toss ideas to and fro between Africa and New Guinea,7 but India, they claimed, is not only "higher" but sui generis. They preferred more august comparisons such as Nilakanta Sastri's of South Indian villages with Roman cities.8 As Leach put it (somewhat cryptically as Fox remarks), "Caste is indissolubly linked with a Pan-Indian civilization. Conse- quently I believe that those who apply the term to contexts wholly remote from the Indian world invariably go astray."9 But as Stein has amply docu- mented, Indian caste was a cultural rather than a political or economic fact when it came to the practical workings of Hindu polities. All the theoretical and ideological questions about the sources of causality and determinism, if any, are raised. Ethnography puts anthropologists in unique command of their own idiosyncratic interpretations. Each is inclined to produce his own model and to destroy theory by equating the number of models with the number of cases. So we have the galactic state'? and the theatre state" propounded from the same kind of materials. This process is further favored by the interpretive turn, which discounts comparison, although the version propounded by

5 Urban India: Society, Space and Image, R. G. Fox, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1970); Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-industrial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Realm and Region in Traditional India, Fox, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977); and Urban Anthropology: Cities in Their Cultural Settings (Engle- wood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977).

6 Burton Stein, "The Segmentary State in South Indian History," in Realm and Region, Fox, ed., 1977; and Peasant, State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).

7 J. A. Barnes, "African Models in the New Guinea Highlands," Man, 52:1 (1961), 5-9; J. S. La Fontaine, "Descent in New Guinea: An Africanist View," in The Character of Kinship, J. Goody, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 35-51; I. Karp, "New Guinea Models in the African Savannah," Africa, 48:1 (1978), 1-16.

8 K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Colas (Madras: University of Madras, 1935-37), 515. 9 E. R. Leach, Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and Northwest Pakistan (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1960), 4. 10 S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1976). 11 C. Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton University

Pre:.s 1980).

54 AIDAN SOUTHALL

Ricoeur offers some fruitful ground for comparison from a new and promising theoretical perspective.12

The horizon has been further widened by Kathleen Gough's cogent argu- ment that the Cola system was an expression of the Asiatic mode of produc- tion. 13 This offers a clue to a certain disquiet arising from the fact that Alur and Cola political economy are indeed very different. The segmentary analy- sis remains valid. But if Cola and Rajput, and probably Thai and Balinese political economies are seen as varied expressions of the Asiatic mode of production, other examples I had suggested become expressions of the feudal mode of production, and Alur political economy becomes an expression of the kinship mode of production. This raises further questions about the cherished anthropological concepts of chief and chiefdom. These are pervasively em-

ployed and firmly embedded in the popular media. However, Elman Service, who has been the most energetic proponent, undermined the legitimacy of these concepts by first expounding, then abandoning them for compelling reasons, but finally readopting them without convincing argument.

The concept of chief and chiefdom has been left inextricably entangled with colonial usage, especially in Africa. Colonial administration at the local level was fundamentally based on the principle of chercher le chef, and if you cannot find him, create him and pretend that he is legitimately traditional.

12 P. Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text", in Interpretive Social Science, P. Rabinow and W. M. Sullivan, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

13 It is impossible here to deal with the vast and controversial literature on the Asiatic mode of production, which can only be treated adequately in the context of other precapitalist modes of production and in consideration of the concept of mode of production itself. I have set out my approach to these questions in "Mode of Production Theory: The Foraging Mode of Production and the Kinship Mode of Production," Dialectical Anthropology, 12:2 (1987), forthcoming. Here I simply explore the relevance and applicability of Karl Marx's seminal but fragmentary theoretical delineation (Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [London: Allen Lane, 1973], 472-74). I am not for the moment concerned with Marx's consideration of the characteristics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India and China in their decadence and confrontation with the capitalist Western world. Kathleen Gough shows in detail from her studies of Thanjavur-the heart of the old Cola Empire- -how closely it conformed to the generally accepted characteristics of the Asiatic mode of production (Rural Society in Southeast India [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 113, 407), but it must be noted that Burton Stein does not agree with her interpretation.

Some arguments eliminate the Asiatic mode of production entirely. We have no space to deal with them in detail. Hindess and Hirst attempted a theory of modes of production totally insulated from any link with history, which they regarded as irredeemably ideological (Precapitalist Modes of Production [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975], 9-12). They were then led to abandon the concept altogether (Mode of Production and Social Formation [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977]). In "Marx' Concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production: A Genetic Analysis" (Econorny and Society, 13:4 [1984], 456, 483), Heinz Lubasz cites Lawrence Krader (The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx [Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975], 304-17) as a "much gentler critique" in the mass of research and analysis from which he says we now know that "the concept of the Asiatic mode of production is empirically untenable and theoretically indefensible." But this passage and the subsequent pages demonstrate irrefutably Krader's not uncritical acceptance of the concept as both empirically and theoretically fruitful and relevant.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 55

Those so created obliged a hundredfold, by effectively magnifying their power and wealth, with appropriately exaggerated accoutrements of geneal- ogy and myth, completely masking their origins and obscuring the nature of their societies. Chiefs and chiefdoms are further strengthened by the concept of tribe, which is still very generally used, and in a manner that contradicts the more meticulous, if erroneous, formulations once made by Service.14 The African counterpart of "orientalism" is "Africanism," whereby a state in Africa is always referred to as a tribe, further confounding Service's formula- tions. A dense tangle of undergrowth has to be cleared away before the segmentary state and its modes of production can be seen in proper perspec- tive, derived entirely from empirical data and viable theoretical formulations rather than half-conscious colonial prejudices.

WHY THE ALUR MAY PROVIDE AN ACCEPTABLE ANALOGY

There are no precolonial written records pertaining to the society or even to any of its neighboring peoples. It was one of the relatively few African societies unaffected by the slave trade or any other non-African intervention, direct or indirect, until the very end of the nineteenth century and even then quite briefly and indirectly. The highland Alur of whom I mainly speak were not brought under direct colonial administration until the rather late date of 1914. These two factors help to justify my view that the development of Alur society was a largely endogenous process and that their knowledge and expe- rience of the nature and working of their social institutions was fairly direct, even when I made their acquaintance in 1947, 1949-53, and numerous subse- quent occasions. Indeed, many of these institutions had continued to work at least partially right up to the time of my arrival, with the very major exception of the right of local groups to engage in self-help and in extremis to defend themselves or attack one another by violent means. On the other hand, I must admit that certain practices, even in matters as supposedly traditional and tenacious as the ways of contracting a marriage, had changed and eroded quite markedly. Another corollary of the above is that very few guns ever reached Alurland. Even at the turn of the century they could only be obtained at very great distances, high cost, and consequently in small numbers.

14 Aidan Southall, "The Illusion of Tribe," Journal of Asian and African Studies, 5:1-2 (1970), 28-50; Morton H. Fried, The Notion of Tribe (Menlo Park: Cummings, 1975). E. R. Service, in a series of publications, first promoted the notions of tribe and of chiefdom as evolutionary stages in a universal scheme, then abandoned it in the face of criticism, but unaccountably began to use it again later: see A Profile of Primitive Culture (New York: Harper, 1958); Primitive Social Organization (New York: Random House, 1962); Cultural Evolutionism (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971); Origin of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975); Profiles in Ethnology (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); and with R. Cohen, Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978). The Service paradigm of tribe and chiefdom is still strongly entrenched in the teaching of archeology, though somewhat defensively if challenged.

56 AIDAN SOUTHALL

While the basic agrarian economy was very little changed by the time of my arrival, I have to admit that I never observed Alur society working as an independent polity with my own eyes. If I speak of the rites of royal succes- sion, I speak from hearsay. If I speak of the process of segmentation, whereby small new polities came into existence, I never saw it myself, but I did meet persons who had been the chief actors in such processes while they were still in operation.

The Influence of Neighboring Societies

If Alur society was not seriously influenced in its development by non- African interference, the possibility of influence by other African societies remains to be considered. The most vexing question here is that of influence from Bunyoro. Bunyoro was the oldest and, through most of its history, the most powerful state in the whole region. Since the Alur rulers were Lwo, and the last dynasty of Bunyoro kings was at least partially of Lwo origin, the question is highly pertinent. In the case of the Acoli neighbors and kinsfolk of the Alur across the Nile to the east, Girling recognized considerable Bunyoro influence and direct contact.15 On the eastern and southeastern fringes of greater Alurland, on the Nile and the western shores of Lake Mutanzige (Albert), there was certainly direct influence from Bunyoro, and some minor ruling lines actually came from there. But they never moved into the northern Alur highlands, where the major kingship developed and where my main researches were conducted. I cannot find any evidence of serious influence from Bunyoro there.16 Indeed, the strongest proof that Bunyoro influence was not significant is that the northern Alur developed a complex, expansive system, which did not occur in any part of Alurland nearer to Bunyoro. The politico-ritual system of greater Bunyoro-Kitara can itself be described as a segmentary state,17 but that must be left to another time.

15 F. K. Girling, The Acholi of Uganda, Colonial Research Studies no. 30 (London, H.M.S.O., 1960).

16 Many aspects of cultural and linguistic exchange, transmission, and borrowing remain mysterious and little studied. A case in point is the politico-religious concept of Rubanga, which appears over a very wide area, including Alur, Acoli, Madi, Teso, Bunyoro, and Buganda. It thus crosses profound linguistic as well as cultural boundaries. Its linguistic connections indicate a Bantu derivation and point to Bunyoro, but because both the linguistic qualities and cultural meanings of Rubanga undergo transformation from one part of the area to another, its message of cultural influence is complex. I have explored this in "Multilingualism and the Cross-cultural Study of Social Meanings," in Language Use and Social Change, W. H. Whiteley, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

17 Beattie's justly famous writings on Bunyoro properly concentrate on the contemporary Bunyoro of the time of his fieldwork, when the Nyoro state had been reduced to a mere fragment of its former size by colonial conquest. In recent conversation with me, for which I am most grateful, John Beattie did not object to the idea of Bunyoro-Kitara as a segmentary state, held together by ritual suzerainty, with a centralized core, though he would probably phrase it in different terms, such as Weber's notions of sultanism and patrimonialism.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 57

Origins of the Alur Segmentary State

Alur society probably began to emerge as a distinctive entity in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when Lwo migrants from the north crossed the Nile and moved west. That part of it which I take as my main example I shall call the segmentary state of Atyak, which was the praise cry and hence the name of its ruling clan. Atyak grew larger in population and territory than any other part of Alurland, because its early rulers and their following moved into a part of the country where they were able to develop the most favorable combina- tion of agriculture and pastoralism, while also remaining beyond the disturb- ing influence of Bunyoro. As they moved westwards from the Nile, up the escarpment into the highlands, they were able to incorporate small groups of earlier settlers (Okebo, Lendu, Madi, Abira, etc.) who belonged to quite different ethnic groups and spoke languages totally different from the Lwo tongue of the Atyak.

The usual Atyak explanation of this incorporation is that the greatness of their king was obvious to the earlier settlers as soon as he arrived among them, so it was natural for them to pay homage to him. In addition, he could make rain and also provided food and entertainment to the earlier settlers they found. The descendants of the latter say much the same. In one instance I was told "the Atyak beguiled us with food." When I asked a group of Lendu on the edge of the zone of Atyak expansion how they obtained rain before the Alur brought it to them, they said "it used to fall on its own." The Atyak also claimed that other peoples accepted their overlordship because they knew how to rule.

How are these symbolic and mystical utterances to be interpreted? My brief speculative conclusion is that when the Atyak ancestors arrived in the coun- try, they consisted of a small, relatively homogeneous group of members of various lineages. They recognized a ritual leader, or recognized several, all of them being senior members of their lineage segments but probably one of them somewhat above the rest, credited with a superior ability to make rain and ensure the fertility of plants, animals, and women but having no coercive political power. They came with cattle, a few sheep, goats, and chickens, and a supply of millet. They were not migrating long distances, but settled down to productive cultivation and herding wherever they stopped.

The population of earlier settlers was probably very sparse, and they may have had fewer domestic animals, especially cattle, than the Atyak. There may not have been any major advantage on either side in productive and offensive equipment. But the Atyak may have appeared to be organized more strongly and on a larger scale in their extensive agnatic lineages and their respect for a superior leader. They would doubtless have entertained the earlier settlers who appeared in their presence with food, beer, music and dancing, offering ritual services in general and above all rainmaking, with a

58 AIDAN SOUTHALL

related willingness to arbitrate in disputes. Since the meeting does not seem in general to have been violent, the process of interaction could have been a very gradual one, as each side observed and became familiar with the other in the daily activities both of material and supernatural production. No doubt there may have been threats of force, but neither side speaks of forceful conquest.

It is very hard in a secular age, even in the imagination, to conceive of one ethnic group submitting and accepting subordination to another without some kind of coercive force or solid material inducement, simply under the impact of belief in more potent supernatural power. But such occurrences evidently did occur in many parts of the world, over and over again,18 even if forceful conquest was more common. The peaceful acceptance of Brahmin superi- ority, influence, and moral authority by South Indian peasants, without the aid of any coercive political force, is a case in point, to be described below. Apparently prosperous peasant villages accepted Brahmin brahmadeya as- semblies among them as an overwhelmingly convincing source of super- natural protection.19 They gave the Brahmins material support and through them became integrated into temple worship and had their Hindu beliefs deepened, which gave them a satisfying sense of having their own ritual and social status elevated and legitimized by the Brahmins, and being offered yet further levels of rewarding mystical aspiration.20

I assume that the Alur polity was actually created by this process of the incorporation of foreigners and did not exist before. Previously, I assume, the

Atyak were just a cluster of segmentary lineages, linked by overlapping chains of complementary opposition, highly egalitarian, disposing of no

strictly political authority and only respecting the ritual-supernatural authority of their leaders. A new political element intruded precisely as the process of

incorporation took place, for the Atyak who had been lineage mates in a

kinship order were now acquiring subjects in a political order. Those who

accepted their food, drink, entertainment, ritual services, and mystical super- natural benefits were expected to reciprocate, either with labor in the fields or with gifts of produce needed by the Atyak. These may have been willingly supplied. The Lendu seem to have had little with which to reciprocate except their labor, though the Alur did make important borrowings from them, of

18 As Maurice Godelier has suggested: "For relations of domination and exploitation to have arisen and reproduced themselves durably in formerly classless societies, such relations must have presented themselves as an exchange and as an exchange of services. This was how they managed to get themselves accepted . . . and to gain the consent-passive or active-of the dominated. . . . The services rendered by the dominant individuals or group must have involved, in the first place, invisible realities and forces controlling (in the thought of these societies) the

reproduction of the universe and of life. . . . The monopoly of the means (to us imaginary) of

reproduction of the universe and of life must have preceded the monopoly of the visible material means of production." "Infrastructures, Society and History," Current Anthropology, 19:4 (1978), 767.

19 Stein, "Segmentary State," 66, 123, 144. 20 Ibid., 79-83.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 59

dance magic, herbal lore, and material culture. The Okebo were able to provide the vital service of ironworking. The Alur had not been without iron, but doubtless it was scarce. The Okebo were both smelters and forgers. Here, even more strikingly, the Atyak appear to have gained ascendancy by the most immaterial payment for very solid services. In Alurland the Okebo had free access to land like everyone else. They lived in their own localized descent groups, were paid in kind for their hoes, spears, knives, arrowheads, and other iron products, also taking them as offerings to the rulers for their mystical and perhaps occasionally adjudicative services. The Lendu seem to have given more direct labor service, for which they would always have been fed. This was a mark of subordination in the sense of a material one-way flow. For although the Lendu did receive a recompense in food, it was an asymmetrical, unequal relationship. Lendu worked for Atyak, but Atyak did not work for Lendu. On the other hand, the same one-way flow occurred among the Atyak, when ordinary folk went to dig the ruler's field and re- ceived a feast of beer and food. Among themselves there was a two-way flow, as each family in turn summoned all its neighbors to dig and provided a feast of beer and food.

Differences of Rank

My explanation differs fundamentally from that of the Atyak, who claim that

they have always been rulers. But nothing in fact has always been so. Mine is an attempt at a logical explanation of how their polity came into existence. Once the process of incorporation had begun, it was accompanied by a paral- lel process of ritual elaboration and legitimation. I have not the temerity to call it a caste system. The Alur had no fully elaborated vama ideology. But there were castelike conceptions at two quite distinct dimensions, the ritual and the politico-economic. The Alur had a clear conception of three social strata: rwodhi, commoners, and non-Lwo. Rwodhi may be glossed as nobles. Rwoth means king or ruler; the plural is rwodhi. The king and any ruler of a segmentary component group is rwoth. One can describe a whole group as rwodhi, in status, but one cannot refer to any individual member of it as rwoth unless he is a ruler. The wealth and polygyny of the ruling Atyak lineage enabled it to grow faster than any other group, so that there are enormous numbers of nominal rwodhi. The more distant their genealogical connection with the central ruling line, the more their social status and daily life approxi- mates to that of ordinary commoners. The non-Lwo groups of Lendu, Okebo, Madi, Abira, etc., rank lower, which may have been more significant in the past but matters less and less today. Others may look down on them or prefer not to marry them, but their material disabilities are few. These three levels have some similarity to Stein's Brahmins, respectable non-Brahmins, and lower castes. But the Alur had no general concept of pollution. Royal and

60 AIDAN SOUTHALL

general polygyny combined with clan exogamy meant frequent marriage of Atyak Lwo with non-Lwo and of Alur commoners with non-Alur.21

Ritual Clans

On the ritual dimension there was a group of ancient clans with special ritual duties (which they perceived as rights and privileges). Padere were the fire drillers who started the king's fire: Panyong'a softened the skins of wild game for the king's robes. Padwur supplied the man on whom the king stepped, pointing his spear at him, at his accession. Formerly this may have been a human sacrifice. Palei had the right to the tail of the bull slaughtered at royal ceremonies, because they had tracked a lost bull up a river bed into the highlands, thus discovering the blessed land that became the core domain of the Atyak rulers. This system lent itself to conceptual proliferation, so that the Alwi clan (actually remote descendants of the Atyak kings and local rulers in their own right) were said to be the king's milkers (lwiyo = to milk), although there was no evidence for this and they now live far away out of the effective range of the central king's rituals. Such special royal privileges of particular clans are very common in African kingdoms. These Alur clans today are mostly small and of no political importance, but they regard their privileges with enormous pride, as a tremendous honor, and the general public concedes the same. There is no clear ranking among them, but Padere seemed to be the most important. Whatever the case in the past, the duties of these clans, as recounted to me, were only the occasional ones at king's funerals and acces- sions, but this did not diminish the high regard in which they were held. Furthermore, it was in any case only a very few members of each clan, or even a single one, who were involved, yet these rare honors spread a perma- nent and constant aura of honor on all their members. Although the full array of these ritual clans appeared only at the "court" of the central Atyak king, they or their counterparts did appear in lesser form attached to the rulers of

peripheral domains. Beside their ritual tasks, some of them provided an

embryonic administrative staff of confidants and envoys.

daily economic occupational specialization of the incorporated ethnic groups

21 There was also a general norm that hunters killing elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo or

antelope should send to the king one tusk, the lion or leopard skin, and one hind leg of buffalo or

antelope. There was some difference of opinion between the king and the subordinate rulers as to which of the latter had the right to receive these offerings on their own-as was clearly recorded

by the oral tradition for the kingdom of Paidha and some others. There is no evidence showing how frequently this norm was observed or transgressed. I conclude that it was not materially sufficient either to alter significantly the relationship of the king or the subordinate rulers to the means of production, or, given their remote position, to offer them the opportunity to develop a

significant trade which would have done so. Such contributions may have been kept as prestige goods in the regalia of rulers and used for occasional ritual distribution between them or as offerings to major shrines.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 6i

amount to a caste system. Nor do they seem to fit any Levi-Straussian concep- tion of a transformation from natural totemic to social occupational classifica- tion. Yet they throw a certain light on the conditions in which such classifica- tions and practices can develop. The Alur political economy did not produce a mobilizable surplus sufficient to enable the rulers to establish full-time oc- cupational categories of firemakers, skin softeners, or milkers from the ritual clans, or even full-time ironworking specialists out of the Okebo. Had they possessed the resources to do so, there can be little doubt that their system would have been legitimized by greater ritual elaboration, which could hardly have escaped a caste form.

Hiving Off

The segmentary polity of the Atyak rulers is explained in the tradition as arising from the hiving off of various king's sons from the central line in successive generations.22 Some two dozen such hived-off segments could be traced over the last twelve generations recorded in the oral tradition. Some prospered more than others. The larger ones were those which, like the central core domain, developed in the highlands and were among the oldest off- shoots, founded eight generations or more ago (from 1950). Some stagnated politically and demographically or even reverted to virtual commoner status. Some were replaced by further infusions of kingship in the form of new kings' sons. Each established a new localized segment of the Atyak lineage. Each of them established at least a ritual supremacy over other Alur lineages, either already there or attracted to them, and over non-Alur groups which they proceeded to incorporate in their hegemony. Some of the larger and more successful of these secondary groups themselves began their own internal hiving-off process, so that there were several levels of political segmentation within the Atyak segmentary state, all above the level of the localized lineage segments that formed the basic local communities.

In Alur accounts of this hiving off process, two opposing emphases may be discerned, one on the activity of dispatching king's sons from the center, the other on the procedures desirous peripheral groups used in obtaining them. Singling out the most vivid details in these accounts, I call the first banish- ment or "troublesome sons" and the second "kidnapping." Both political considerations and considerations of religious and mystical power were al-

22 "Hiving off" is my term. Each case tended to have its own descriptive characterization according to its special circumstances. For example, Paidha was named after the fact that the King of Ukuru said that his son Magwar had been "snatched away" (kidnapped) from him (juyudhiayudha-hence Payudha or Paidha) to become their ruler (Alur Society, p. 183). A frequent way of referring to the phenomenon was jubyeleabyela (they just carried him off on their shoulders). The other type was characterized by the ruler's command to an unruly son, "Go out there and subdue the country." See Alur Society, pp. 181-89 on kidnapping and banishment, and 189-228 for a general account of the system.

62 AIDAN SOUTHALL

ways involved in both cases. One stereotypic view of expert informants from the king's circle envisages king's sons growing up into young men and begin- ning to throw their weight about, causing trouble among the king's followers, stealing their goats and harassing their wives, or even misbehaving with the king's own young wives. Rather than imposing stem discipline for such offenses, the king solves the problem by sending such sons out into the periphery to fend for themselves and "make their fortunes" politically and mystically speaking. In a sense this was banishment, but at the same time it was setting the young man up to make himself a successful new political and ritual ruler if he had the qualities to cope with the opportunity. He could be sent off with a small entourage, herd of livestock and food supply, a wife or wives, and perhaps even his mother. "Go!" says the king. "Break (tame) the land over there," pointing perhaps to some distant hill.

Other accounts emphasize the need of a peripheral group for a king's son to live among them for the benefits that would flow to them. A king's son could provide all the services of the king himself on a lesser scale: mystical protec- tion and well being, rain making, arbitration, adjudication, political lead- ership, and the generation of new flows of exchange, reciprocity, and celebra- tion. Commoners said that a king's son (apparently even if only a child) could protect them from the wrath and costly reprisals of the king himself, if he was threatening to come and plunder them for some serious offense. Such a peripheral group would send envoys to the king begging him to send a son to live among them, promising to treat him with all the respect his royalty deserved. The king would say, "Look down there in the valley. My son so and so is playing there with his mother. Go and catch them and take them both." This kind of account suggests a young boy, rather than an obstre- perous full-grown young man. Probably both kinds occurred. Furthermore, it was most likely that some rather loyal and fully assimilated Alur group would go and beg the king to send them one of his sons, whereas in banishing the troublesome son the king typically sent him out among the unincorporated, non-Alur groups to extend the process of assimilation and enlarge the realm. But the distinction was not absolute. Either version resulted in an increase in the potential numbers of secondary units of segmentary kingship within the realm as a whole and thus led to an increase in the extent, or intensity, or both, of kingship operating in the region.

In line with this, the kidnapping version seems to stress the mystical and general services resulting from the mere presence of a scion of royal stock, whereas the troublesome son form suggests the diversion of destructive phys- ical power to more approved and beneficial use-according to the rulers! I actually met one aged elder who had been "kidnapped," and several men who were second generation sons and successors of troublesome sons who had been sent out and made good. The kidnapping theme also draws attention

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 63

to the reluctance to accept the mystically dangerous kingly role, which also required certain personality characteristics to make it a success. This phe- nomenon is very widely reported in Africa.23

The Degree of State Integration The combination of foot transportation, hilly terrain, a highly localized econ- omy, no markets, and quite limited exchange meant minimal communication between the different component units of the segmentary polity, apart from those quite close to one another, so that a centralized, unitary political organi- zation was out of the question. There was a definite recognition of the great- ness and seniority of the rulers of the core domain, except that a few of the larger offshoots tended to claim equality and autonomy. This, however, may have been a recent development, because for forty years they had been effec- tively cut off from the core domain by the international frontier between Uganda and the Belgian Congo.

There was some recognition that the hived-off units should send prestations of elephants' tusks, lion and leopard skins, and cattle to the core domain on rare occasions such as the death and accession of kings. Nothing of the sort occurred during my time. Some prestations would probably have been seen as tribute by the core domain and as gifts by the sender. More important was the idea that the sacral power of kingship, to make rain and ensure fertility, was derived from the center and must be kept potent by the center, through a kind of indirect investiture. The core ruler would send royal apparel, regalia, and rainmaking equipment to each successive ruler of a peripheral domain on his accession or even send him special paraphernalia for making rain in a situa- tion of great need. On the other hand, some peripheral rulers became es- pecially famous for their rainmaking abilities and much sought after, to the chagrin of the central ruler.24 Such fame may have developed because some peripheral rulers were in special ecological niches, different from that within which the central king operated in the core domain, and therefore needed local rainmaking expertise. I have no empirical evidence of these procedures, which had probably already been discouraged or inhibited by the colonial system. By the 1950s the king received a small salary and a car from the colonial government, but gifts and labor service from his people had sadly dwindled, so that he complained of poverty and inability to afford the bulls which he should have sent to various ritual occasions. Though he still pos- sessed quite large herds, all may have been needed to marry off his sons.

23 For example, Monica Wilson, Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (London: Oxford Univer- sity Press for International African Institute, 1959).

24 Compare the fluctuating fortunes of rain shrines among the Plateau Tonga: Elizabeth Colson, "Rain Shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia," Africa, 18:3, (1948) 272- 83.

64 AIDAN SOUTHALL

Shrines

In their westward migration up into the highlands, the Atyak had deposited shrines at several places on the way. For example, one night long ago a termite mound appeared in the house of the king's mother, and the diviner said that the god refused to move and must have a shrine made for him on the spot. The material embodiment of the god was said to be a bowl containing earth from the original homeland. Two such important shrines are now out- side the core domain, and there is clear recognition that the king ought to send a deputation and a bull for sacrifice at them on specific occasions. Representa- tives of the other component segments ought also to attend, thus to some extent symbolically activating the ritual unity of the segmentary state. This now occurs very irregularly and in a truncated fashion, if at all. These were of course holy places, comparable in their embryonic way to the temples of South India. Yet, unlike the latter, they could not be founded at will, but were seen as depending upon the mysterious and uncontrollable movements of the royal god. In this sense they were a much more limited instrument for further- ing ritual and political integration compared with the temples in India.

Political Control

All Alur had the right of self-defense, and short-term fighting between neigh- boring groups was legitimate. But continued fighting was supposed to bring down the wrath of the king as an affront to his stool, at least in the central domain. Such incidents were not frequent, but they occurred and were re- nowned. The king's only means of punishment was to call upon other loyal local groups to join with him in plundering the recalcitrant groups. Such reprisals were greatly feared, rare as they probably were. It was feared that the king would come and establish himself in the disobedient group and while there eat up all their substance of grain and livestock. The same process should have been carried out by the rulers of peripheral segments, but I have no comprehensive evidence of this. Homicide in itself was a public offense that polluted the king's stool. The culprit group had to make amends by presenting a sheep for sacrifice (or in some accounts two virgins) or risk reprisals. This plunder mechanism is one of the most elemental and effective forms of political coercion, with the great advantage of freely harnessing the baser motives of rival groups in a state policing operation that brings its own direct reward.

It is on the basis of these practices and processes that I define the segmen- tary state as one in which there is a central kingship and many peripheral rulers. Political sovereignty is only exercised by the king within the central domain (which is indeed defined by this fact) and is also exercised autono- mously by each peripheral ruler in his own domain. The sometimes minuscule

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 65

kingships of the peripheral domains are replicas of the central kingship writ small.

ALUR, RAJPUT, AND COLA MODES OF PRODUCTION

The striking similarities of the Rajput and Cola polities with the Alur are nonetheless set in a context which in important respects is fundamentally different. Put most simply, the former were expressions of the Asiatic mode of production, whereas the Alur remained within the kinship mode.25 Rajputs and Colas were correspondingly vastly larger in both population and territory.

The fundamental characteristic of the theoretical model of the Asiatic mode of production adumbrated by Marx is that the local, kin-based communities, which had existed autonomously before the formation of the state, continued to retain most of their autonomy and self-sufficiency. They managed their own day-to-day affairs much as they had before and "contained all the condi- tions of reproduction and surplus production within themselves," but now

they were required to pay a tax-rent tribute to the state.26 As long as they did so, they might expect to be left in peace, but if they did not, they could expect violent and punitive reprisals at irregular intervals, as in the plunder mecha- nism. The other essential features of the Asiatic mode of production are

logically entailed in this basic relationship. As Marx put it:

The comprehensive unity standing above all these little communities appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor; the real communities hence only as heredi- tary possessors. Because the unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property, it follows that this unity can appear as a particular entity above the many real particular communities where the individual is then in fact propertyless, or, property,-i.e. the relation of the individual to the natural conditions of labor and of reproduction as belonging to him, as the objective, nature-given inorganic body of his subjectivity,-appears mediated for him through a cession by the total unity-a unity realized in the form of the despot, the father of the many communities-to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune . . . this clan or commu- nal property exists in fact as the foundation, created mostly by a combination of manufactures and agriculture within the small commune, which thus becomes al- together self-sustaining, and contains all the conditions of reproduction and surplus production with itself. A part of their surplus labor belongs to the higher community, which exists ultimately as a person, and this surplus labor takes the form of tribute, etc., as well as of common labor for the exaltation of the unity, partly of the real despot, partly of the imagined clan being, the god.27

25 Southall, "Mode of Production." 26 Ambiguity arises because the state is a ritual rather than a political reality over much of its

area most of the time. Hence the extraction of surplus from localities seems like an intrusion having an external quality, yet, on the other hand, it is a kind of payment for "free" access to economic resources. The extraction thus has the characteristics of rent but is obtained by political means, since the land has not become the private property of those who pay. 27 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 472-73.

66 AIDAN SOUTHALL

Marx here presciently grasps the essential nature of the political economy and of the fundamental supernatural, ritual element in it, which imparts a contradictory combination of apparent freedom and ruthless tyranny. He also recognizes that the same basic model can be elaborated in various ways, more and less developed, in "a more despotic or a more democratic form."

All these features, apart from the distinctive tax-rent tribute, obtained in Alur communities in embryonic form. All these features, including the tax- rent tribute, appear in more developed form as characteristic of the Cola Empire in Gough's account.28 According to her summary, the surplus extract- ed as tax-rent was monopolized by the monarch and the ruling class, compris- ing the royal court, the priests, the officials, the military, and the subordinate local rulers who took their cut on the way. There was no private landholding nobility, in marked contrast to the feudal principle of nulle terre sans sei- gneur. The monarch was in theory a despot, but mainly within the ruling class of the core domain, while in a mystical and ritual sense he was held to be the overall owner of the land and territory and responsible for its well-being: he possessed narrow political sovereignty within a broader ritual suzerainty. As the surplus increased, more entered the market through traders. Towns and cities developed, with a commodity economy mainly confined to merchants and the ruling class, while the masses of the population remained in their largely self-subsistent communities.

Gough claims that the division of labor and form of organization among village producers in the Cola territory changed little from the first to the eighteenth century, but productivity increased, and the size of the extracted

surplus rose from about one-sixth to about one-half of the crop. As the surplus grew, so did the cities, commodity production, and the division of labor among commodity producers and the ruling class. It remained a theocratic state governed by religiosi, resting on religious law and oral commands of the monarch. Similarly, Burton Stein considers that the agrarian order founded by the Colas from the ninth to the twelfth century lasted essentially unchanged until the nineteenth century, despite dynastic changes, economic and demo- graphic growth, and the development and specialization of new institutions.29 Therefore changes did take place, although the basic continuity of the agrarian society at the base gave that impression of "changelessness" which Marx derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European travellers' ac- counts. The Cola state also developed centrally coordinated, large-scale irri- gation works in the major river basins and built roads, hospitals, and vast

religious monuments. Given the Indian context, the local community was also "contaminated by distinctions of caste and slavery," but these were commu- nal not private distinctions.30

28 Gough, "Rural Society," 105, 110, 113, 407-409. 29 Stein, Peasant, State and Society, 4. 30 Gough, "Rural Society."

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 67

The Cola thus contrast with the Alur in scale and in complexity, with a higher level of productivity, yielding a much larger extractable surplus, stim- ulating and further stimulated by the development of trade, markets, mer- chants and cities, all exploited in the creation of a costly and elaborate super- structure of religious, political, and military institutions. The Asiatic mode of production may thus seem at first sight like a kind of hybrid, in which a new superstructure is added on to the pre-existing, unchanged base. But if we look further at the Alur and Cola examples, refining the analysis, we see that the base was not unchanged. The features of the agrarian system were indeed "unchanging" for the majority of the population, but the accompanying elements of change were critical and causative.

Most distinctive was the capacity of local leaders-inspired, fired, and legitimized by Brahmanical exhortation, beliefs, and values-to extract from the direct producers a nominally specific percentage of their product and transmit it, with subtractions on the way, to the central ruling class. This was made possible by the higher level of productivity and technology, signalled especially by the plow, the wheel, the cart, draft oxen, horses, rice cultiva- tion, and irrigation. Irrigation, which was concentrated in two or three major river basins, was not a result of large-scale state public works but, rather, arose within the agrarian economy as it became more specialized in adapting to the differential opportunities of particular ecological niches. Large-scale state public works were made possible by the increased productivity and the expanded state apparatus based on its exploitation, rather than the other way round.31 The high productivity of the great alluvial basins attracted to them a concentration of both ritual and political resources (as well as trading ac- tivity): the brahmadeya communities, great temples and shrines, the royal capital city, and the headquarters of the major political and military as well as religious decision-making organs. Population and economy were markedly differentiated between the irrigated basins, with large numbers of landless laborers, the dry and swidden cultivation areas, and the pastoral and hunting and gathering zones, with very unequal shares of the product even within the peasant class having general access to land.32 It is evident that the forces and relations of production were significantly different from those of the Alur.

The Cola and also the Rajput ruling class had royal estates and control of a labor force from which they extracted direct income. They enjoyed a wide range of specialized crafts and prestige luxury goods. They lived in sump- tuous courts and palaces which supported and enhanced the sacred mystique of their ritual dharmic status, which was empowered by the immensely influ- ential services of the Brahmin caste and of the great temples under their care. They had bands of professional warriors and could indulge in constant raids

31 Stein, Peasant, State and Society, 24. 32 Ibid., 26.

68 AIDAN SOUTHALL

and occasional wars of conquest. Yet they extended their sway over people rather than territory, and what they gained was recognition of their symbolic rule rather than any secure system of central administration and taxation. The main material gain was momentary booty to help finance their extrava- gance.33 While kings and some local rulers could control estates and labor, the vast proportion of the territory remained under the autonomous control of local kin groups, and the basic relationship between the center and peripheral units remained that of ritual suzerainty rather than political sovereignty.

The Cola and Rajput ruling classes were quite clearly separated from the mass of direct producers. The Alur rulers and their small entourages were not. In their case we may assume, at most, that the small ruling group achieved a higher level of polygyny than the rest by manipulation of the exchange of cattle for women and of ritually sanctioned first fruit offerings. This expanded their lineages in relation to the rest of society and enabled the men to spend much of their time on ritual and political rather than productive activities. But it did not remove their household economies from the common, basic, self- subsistent system of production. All Alur had free access to land and produc- tive resources as members of localized kin groups. Households made their own housing, clothes, utensils, and food, but they were not self-sufficient. They depended on neighboring kinsfolk, mainly within the corporate lineage group, for fundamental tasks in agriculture, house building and moving, collective participation, support and mutual responsibility in all life cycle and crisis rituals, in local dispute settlement, collective action in relation to higher authority, and in initial defense against any external threat. The commensal unit was the minimal lineage, not the individual household. All lived at the same subsistence level, except that the ruling elite probably enjoyed a greater abundance of beer, meat, and milk.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF KINGSHIP

Despite differences of scale, grandeur, resources, and mode of production, Indian states were still segmentary states like the Alur segmentary state, and both were essentially moral systems, deeply recognized and accepted by the populace at large, yet combining the contradictory elements of predator alld peacemaker in their construction of kingship. The Alur perceived the king on the one hand as a sacred figure bringing rain, fertility, and general social well- being, and on the other hand as a carnivore (ng'u), a lion or leopard, a predator, fierce, ruthless, plundering, and eating up the people's substance.

This aspect of the king's role was admired as well as feared. In the South Indian kingship analyzed by Stein, the same contradictory components ap- pear: the warrior conqueror, admired but feared, pillaging and taking booty from foreign enemies to support his kingly pomp and circumstance, but also

33 Ibid., 39-41.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 69

the sanctified figure "married to the state,"34 created by both training and ritual imitation according to the conceptions and practices elaborated by the learned Brahmin scholar priests, which made him a "universal ruler" who "ruled the world." The Brahmins built up and maintained an enormous moral authority through their control of writing, divine knowledge and sacred texts, mathematics, accounting, and administrative methods, and their devotional and ascetic piety-despite constant falling away and distortion of principle, with sometimes one aspect, sometimes another, receiving the greatest empha- sis. This moral authority provided the foundation for that of the kingship. In turn, material support and benefits flowed to the Brahmins from kings and rulers above and from peasants and local notables below. One cannot help but recall the analogous use of iearned churchmen for both their sacred and secular abilities by the illiterate rulers of early feudal states in Europe.

The Rajput comparison presents two slight difficulties. First, the details of the productive system and the organization of the groups involved in it are not made clear, and, second, the Rajput rulers are only segmentary rulers within a vastly larger state-the Mughal Empire and the successor states of its decline such as Oudh, or Banaras-which remain somewhat invisible off stage, treat- ed only in their occasional incursions but not in their own right. Bringing them more fully into the picture would, in fact, greatly accentuate the seg- mentary aspects of the system.

ALUR AND RAJPUT SEGMENTARY LINEAGES

There was considerable similarity between the Rajputs and the Alur since in both cases the rulers of peripheral units were the heads of lineage segments, and the links between many of them were also phrased in the idiom of common lineage. But the links between the Rajput polities and the central state itself, whether the Mughal Empire or the successor states, were phrased not in the lineage idiom of kinship but in the idiom of power and of a mixture of Islamic and Hindu kingship concepts. Although the Mughal Emperor, the Raja of Banares, or the Navab of Oudh were normally remote from the local Rajput rulers, they had the power and resources to intervene devastatingly on occasion, as when the Raja of Banares attacked and captured the chief town of the Rajputs of Lakhuesar because they had not paid their land rent.35

This is no doubt a further development of the plunder mechanism, but it reflects a level of mobilization of economic and political resources which was not available to the Alur central ruler and belongs to a different mode of production. The small courts of the local Rajputs, and even more the sump- tuous courts in the great fort palaces of Agra and Delhi, belonged to another world. The power of the state was occasionally enforced by the development

34 Ibid., 267. 35 Fox, ed., Urban India, 178.

70 AIDAN SOUTHALL

of naked force and military coercion, yet this did not lead to a comprehensive state and territorial administrative system. Day-to-day relations between the center and the subunits at their various levels remained essentially segmen- tary. Burton Stein concludes that effective bureaucratic government was not attained in India before the nineteenth century.36 The north Indian segmentary states were rarely molded into great kingdoms except for brief periods by extraordinary rulers such as Asoka or Samudragupta,37 or possibly Akbar and the seventeenth-century Mughals.

THE RAJPUT DEVELOPMENTAL CYCLE

Fox delineates a developmental cycle for Rajput ruling lineages, affecting their relations with the peasant communities below and the overarching state above.38 He pictures the birth and rise to power of a local Rajput lineage as it expands, while the leaders acquire direct control over central land and labor, establishing an impartible estate for the hereditary rulers. As the leaders become prominent, the larger state will intervene to co-opt them as members of its court, as tax gatherers and military supporters. He suggests that if the state is strong, the local ruling Raja and his lineage also increase in strength. They may have sufficient power to increase their exploitative extractions to the point where they become intolerable and the peasants flee, resorting to banditry and pillage, resulting in anarchy, wastelands, famine, epidemics, and depopulation. Eventually, out of chaos the opportunity appears for a new lineage to arise, from within or without, and a similar cycle of development begins all over again. Fox suggests that if the overall state weakened, the Rajput rajas and their elites would also be diminished and their lesser lineage brethren would benefit from a relaxation of harsh conditions. The state could even bypass weakened rajas altogether, settling their revenue demands di- rectly with the headmen of villages and minor lineages. But one would have thought this more likely under a very strong rather than a weak state govern- ment.

In further illustration, Fox quotes the example of Chattisgarh, which was reportedly conquered by Rajputs in about 1000 A.D., after a presumed aborig- inal period of autonomous local kin groups. But, as Fox remarks, this might just as well have been the internal development of a ruling line, rather than external conquest, as was also apparently the case in the Bhumij state of Barabhum.39 In 1741 Mahratta elements overran the Chattisgarh rajas and endeavored to establish a centralized state, eliminating all revenue and politi-

36 Stein, Peasant, State and Society, 13. 37 Ibid., 47. 38 Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule, pp. 58-128. 39 Ibid., 138-40.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 71

cal intermediaries between the state and the actual cultivator.40 This was the rarely fulfilled dream in many precapitalist states from China to Peru.

The eighteenth-century state of Barabhum consisted of nine political divi- sions under the overall rule of the raja, who directly administered the largest division, the smallest being assigned to his eldest son. The other seven were under local rulers, who came to the raja's aid in times of foreign military threat or when extraordinary funds were required. But the raja had no right of taxation and little coercive power over the local rulers. His main income came from the core domain.41 This is a political account, which needs to have the economic base and the religious and ritual system spelled out in detail. In contrast, the Alur central ruler had no coercive power over the local rulers.

COLA SEGMENTARY COMPONENTS

The surface similarity between the Alur and Rajput segmentary systems rests upon the presence of agnatic segmentary lineages in both, though they do not extend to the very top of the Rajput system at the central state level as they do in the Alur case. By contrast, the Cola segmentary system does not rest solely upon segmentary lineages. Its segmentary components were of different types, consisting mainly of the varying kinds of agrarian peasant communities (nadu) including their internal kinship structures and the Brahmadeya assem- blies. The latter consisted of groups of related Brahmins (supported by a share of the production of a village, or of a whole group of villages, granted to it by the village elders, or the local overlord, or the king) organized in an assembly. The assembly appointed specialized, rotating committees, to look after such affairs as gardens, tanks, shrines, roads, assessments, gold and the annual cycle of ritual activities.42 In certain cases where the peasants had been moved, the Brahmadeya acquired its own labor force and organized its own production. Brahmadeyas were mainly concentrated in the densest popula- tions of the most productive areas, the irrigated lower river valleys, but their influence spread widely throughout the state. Most Brahmins were probably not in Brahmadeyas but scattered about the countryside, caring for temples and supplying the peasants with ritual and specialist services. The Brahmins had to recite the Vedas, the Puranas and the Mahabharata. They taught the Vedas to other Brahmins and supported learned Brahmins, seminaries, and pilgrims, also setting calendars for marriages, festivals, plowing, and other major peasant activities. Brahmins and Brahmadeyas had no part in the dis- tribution of surplus production, which was organized by the dominant peasant groups of the nadu community, who distributed it in customary and unequal

40 Ibid., 143. 41 Ibid., 138-40. 42 Stein, Peasant, State and Society, 146.

72 AIDAN SOUTHALL

shares to everyone from the lowest laborer to the most skilled craftsman, the locality overlord and the Brahmins themselves. Special grants were made to Brahmins by peasant groups and nadus, and increasingly by regional over- lords and the kings themselves. The Brahmadeya assemblies could sometimes allocate tasks to the village, encouraging some activities and prohibiting others. As most were concentrated in the wealthiest, central part of the king- dom, some were very close to royalty. They could receive instructions from royal military officials to grow certain crops to ensure royal supplies. The king and court had tremendous power over the core domain within their reach, and there were some arbitrary exactions, but this kind of coercive power did not spread beyond the core domain to the greater part of the kingdom.

One set of records shows 1,300 villages, of which 250 were Brahmadeyas, 50 were devadana (villages with part of their production devoted to a particu- lar temple), while 26 were nagaras (urban, market, and specialist artisan craft concentrations subject to the special influence of merchant assemblies). Other records, not necessarily complete, show the villages of the three main regions of the Cola state (Colamandalam in the center, Tondaimandelam in the North, and Pandyamandalam in the South) totalling 2,620 villages grouped in 556 nadus, the latter varying from 10 to 300 square miles in area, according to the availability of water. Stein shows convincingly that the nadu system antedates the Cola state conquest and that many may even go back to neolithic farming communities. They were essentially self-managing, largely autonomous

agrarian communities, run by assemblies of their most substantial peasant farmers, and usually recognizing the ritual authority of a local line of heredi-

tary rulers who modeled themselves on the supreme dharma of the central

kingship. There are no records of nadu boundaries, which may well have been indeterminate and fluctuating, as boundaries in segmentary states usually were. Some villages transferred from one nadu to another. Nadu assemblies looked after local accounts, revenue registers, assessments, and temple man-

agement.43 They were coherent ethnic units, corporately organizing their economies within their own territory. There were no fiefs, or benefices, or

any kind of feudal tenure. Stein's account displays a formidable marshalling of diverse data, most

soundly based on evidence from the tens of thousands of stone and metal inscriptions, which were not mere records but constituted the expressive linkage mechanism of ritual kingship.44 It runs counter to the prevailing views of many renowned historians, who have their reasons for exaggerating the centralization and bureaucratic efficiency of Indian states and erroneously interpreting the ideal ideological scheme of Brahmanic caste as a statement of actual economic and political arrangements. Stein was led to reinterpret South

43 Ibid., 111. 44 Ibid., 46.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 73

Indian, and by implication all Indian history, through the model of the seg- mentary state.

VIJAYANAGARA

In late Cola times certain nadus began to gain ascendancy over their neighbor territories, which became grouped into larger complexes called periyanadus. This was accompanied and made possible by the crystallization of a new ruling class more detached from the peasantry and more closely allied to the merchants in the cities. This growing class began to replace the weakened Brahmadeyas, as Brahmadeyas and secular leaders became more competitive for shares of peasant production and some peasants consequently fled. The temples lacked coercive power but were protected by many growing sects. There was a convergence between the growth of towns as trade centers, as temple centers, and as the centers of periyanadus with their more powerful and more concentrated dominant classes risen from the former peasantries.

The Cola state began to collapse at the end of the thirteenth century with internal conflicts and attacks from the north by bands of Telugu warriors who eventually reached the very southern tip of India, establishing themselves as local rulers, called nayakas, recognizing the overlordship of the new dynasty of Vijayanagara in the city of that name on the Tungabadhra river. The rise of Vijayanagara was in part a reaction to the growing military threat from Mus- lims in the north, most immediately in the Bahmani state. But although Vijayanagara was the last great expression of Hindu power and independence in South India, the Vijayanagara state's founders actually acquired their spe- cial abilities from service under Muslim rulers, and to maintain and extend their Hindu power they employed tens of thousands of Muslim horsemen, who had greatly increased the effectiveness of cavalry. There was also an increase in the efficiency of firearms and of fortifications, which proliferated through the countryside. Brahmins lost some respect and were drawn into more political activity, as commanders of forts, governors of territories, and checks on the nayakas.

It was almost a war state, with the nayakas as supralocal power holders, engaging in both defensive and predatory warfare together with the great kings. War booty provided their main support, making them more indepen- dent of local economies. It appeared somewhat closer to a feudal system than the previous Cola state and was described as such by the Portuguese, who misinterpreted the Kongo kingdom also in this way.45 Yet there was no system of fealty, homage, or subinfeudation. The state remained a pyramid of semi-autonomous segments. The kings came to be represented as homologous to the gods, in a much more direct personal way than under the Colas. The

45 Kajsa Ekholm, Power and Prestige: The Rise and Fall of the Kongo Kingdom (Uppsala: Skriv Service AB, 1972), 12.

74 AIDAN SOUTHALL

temples were more closely associated with kingship, and enormous festivals were held after the spring and autumn harvests. After intrusive conquests, conquered leaders were left to continue in office, so that beyond the core domain kingship remained ritual, with local territories and communities largely self-governing, not linked to the center either by resource flows or command.

The Vijayanagara state mobilized a great deal of power but was inherently very unstable, with militant nayakas competing with one another and some- times threatening the center. There were many changes of dynasty, with great violence and treachery within the ruling families. The system began to weak- en and break up in the sixteenth century, as the Cola had in the thirteenth. As Vijayanagara collapsed in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, the Tamil country became the territorial base for a new crop of segmentary successor states.

The history of the Colas, with the Pallavas before them and Vijayanagara following-a development with some continuities over more than a millen- nium-shows definite economic growth in the increasing intensity and inte- gration of agricultural exploitation throughout the region, accompanied by greater development of crafts, trade, and urban centers, definite political evolution in the increasing mobilization of military power, and a complemen- tary growth and concentration of religious institutions. Yet the essentially pyramidal, segmentary nature of the state was not transcended. Polity and economy were not effectively integrated at the center, because no effective or regular system of administration extended from the center. There was intense development of the complementary, dual aspect of kingship both as a predato- ry, military institution and as a divinely sanctioned focus of supernatural and moral claims propagated by a vast ceremonial complex. Nevertheless, the system of production and exchange was left largely to develop within its own local opportunities, subject to irregular political extractions that were more intense at the center than the periphery. The discrepancy between the narrow central concentration of direct political power and the great spread of ritual suzerainty was in no way reduced.

PARADIGM

The definitions of the kinship mode of production and the Asiatic mode of production, together with the empirical examples discussed, suggest a para- digm of logical or morphological stages, which need not be regarded as necessarily evolutionary, although there are strong hints that they may be. Stein raises the possibility that the local nadu communities of the Cola Empire may reach back more than a millennium through the preceding Pallava and Sangam eras to neolithic farming communities. My speculative reconstruction of the origins of the Alur segmentary state provides another example.

I. In the first logical stage, the kin-based, segmentary society has no heredi-

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 75

tary rank differences. Custodians of rain shrines or senior lineage members in charge of ancestor shrines or similar ritual personages, who become endowed with supernatural powers in their own person or in their office as it develops, provide the focus for flows of prestations, which are, in turn, almost entirely consumed by the congregation offering them.

II. The next logical stage occurs when such ritual personages have arro- gated or been granted by their immediate followers further privileges, powers, and also restrictions, which distinguish them more sharply from the rest of the population, elaborating their position into a more formal office. Now the incumbent must be chosen by specific procedures, creating a position that, while conferring distinction, may be feared as much as coveted. Such was the Lwembe of the Nyakyusa, described in detail by Monica Wilson.46 The Lwembe was hedged about with ritual restrictions, secluded from sight, might not tread in water, sit on a green banana leaf, or fall ill. On him depended the well-being of the people and their society, yet his mystical power could also kill, although his political power was nil.47

III. Such a ritual figurehead with his kin or entourage may under favorable circumstances be tempted and able to exploit their position, crystallizing differences of rank and privilege between themselves and the rest of the population and adding political elements to the ritual office, as when homi- cide is prohibited within the core domain and, if committed, must be atoned for by payment of compensation to the central office, on pain of the plunder mechanism. Economic changes lie at the root of these developments. The Lwembe's neighbor, the Kyungu of the Ng'onde, had originally been similar- ly a powerless figure, according to the Wilsons.48 After he came in touch with traders from the East African coast, he built up the ivory trade and developed far more wealth and centralized authority. The Alur were also about at this stage, though increased agrarian productivity and population, rather than the growth of external trade, probably led to the increased power of Alur kings. But, as we have seen, the Alur king still could not tax and had no regular tribute, so that his household, though larger than others, remained at an essentially subsistence level. Yet he claimed and exercised a rudimentary political sovereignty over his immediate domain and a ritual suzerainty over a much wider area.

The Barabhum described by Fox appear also to have been in this stage but somewhat more advanced than the Alur. After all, they belonged at least to the periphery of a far more advanced political world, which was bound to

46 Monica Wilson, Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa, 7-29. 47 The Nyakyusa country was very fertile but extremely mountainous, thus favorable to

productivity but very unfavorable to communication, even by comparison with the Atyak Alur, whose mountain terrain was much less extreme.

48 Monica Wilson, Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa; and Godfrey Wilson, The Constitution of Ng'onde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1939, 1968).

76 AIDAN SOUTHALL

have some serendipitous influence. Chattisgarh was probably in this stage or the previous one, until the Rajput conquest brought them into stage IV, while their Mahratta conquerors attempted to move into stage V.

The First fruits that Alur commoners contributed annually at harvest time to their rulers could be regarded simply as ritual prestations to finance the public ceremonies of worship on which the health and prosperity of all depended. They could even be regarded as voluntary, in contrast to the enforced tax-rent of the Colas, but, without reverting to the exaggerated "custom is king" perspective, the concept of voluntary does have rather restricted meaning when nonperformance is believed to have such dire consequences as misfor- tune, disease, or death for oneself, one's family, one's livestock, or one's crops. Such prestations probably enlarged the food and beer supply of the ruler and his circle to some extent. They provide the pattern to which the tax- rent tribute also initially conforms, though it falls on the other side of an important threshold. To draw an absolutely clear line between the one and the other is impossible, yet we are on the fundamental boundary between the ritual and the political. It is easy in theory to state that the ritual becomes the political as soon as coercion can be applied. In practice the distinction is not so clear. This is also a transition between ritual, symbolic, and psychological coercion through supernatural terror, on the one hand, and the same means supplemented by political, physically enforced compulsion, on the other. Since both forms of coercion are most of the time potential rather than actual, the theoretical distinction must remain empirically obscure. However, this is precisely where we place the logical and theoretical threshold between social formations expressing the kinship mode of production and social formations expressing the Asiatic mode of production: the threshold between stateless, classless society and state-organized, class-bound society.49

IV. The ability to extract tribute presupposes higher productivity and a larger extractable surplus, as well as improved means of enforcement. It is reasonable to treat this as the critical definitional point, at which the rudimen- tary form of the Asiatic mode of production emerges from the kinship mode. The direct producers remain in autonomous communities, but the ruler and his close family, kin, and retainers become a ruling class of parasitic consumers, with a relationship to the means of production quite distinct from that of the direct producers. This stage was already well developed in the Cola Empire and had already obtained for many centuries, based on a more productive economy and advanced technology. Despite increasing wealth, expansion, and specialization in the royal court and ruling class, merchants, trade, mar- kets, cities, and public works, neither the Cola nor the succeding Vijayana- gara Empire transcended the segmentary structure and autonomy of the local

49 Godelier, "Infrastructures."

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 77

communities. This lack of effective political centralization manifested itself in numerous successor states after the breakup of Vijayanagara.

The Rajputs were also at this stage, although the importance of their seg- mentary lineage system in Fox's account makes them seem in this respect more similar to the Alur. They were only a small part of the vast Mughal system, which has usually been regarded as more centralized but by the

application of Stein's arguments, as well as Fox's evidence, would also belong here.

V. There is always a tendency to increase the pressure on direct producers for more extractable surplus, which leads to disaffection and possible seces- sion, especially on the borders of the state.50 Repressing and preventing these disintegrative currents requires a greater, more permanent, and therefore bet- ter organized mobilization of control and coercion through both administra- tion and standing armies. Such measures in turn also raise costs, demand more taxes, and further increase pressure on direct producers to the breaking point, when they must either flee or rebel, leading to a vicious cycle and eventual collapse, as experienced over and over again in China. To escape this there is great incentive to increase productivity by more direct and de- tailed control of direct producers and of the economy as a whole.

In the Ch'in conquest and the Han dynasty which quickly followed it, China overcame its earlier segmentary structure. Not surprisingly, since ade- quate knowledge of economic structure and process is always harder to come by than knowledge of dynasties, battles, conquests, and political events, Chinese history is stronger on the latter than the former. It is unnecessary to repeat cliches about increased productivity and economic improvement pre- ceding or accompanying political changes. After the Ch'in-Han unification, China was notoriously subject to the vicious cycle referred to above, with the repeated collapse of dynasties, loss of unity, followed even after centuries with the recovery of unity-sometimes an even stronger unity. In the course of this, the bureaucratic tendency-essentially a response to the goal of achieving more effective and comprehensive political and economic con- trol-became even stronger, until the meritocratic system of selecting man- darin administrators by competitive examination was fully achieved.

At the same time there was a constant intensification of cultivation, with improvements in technology, meticulous methods, addition of crops and breeding of seeds, all raising the productivity of the land. During the T'ang dynasty, and in some areas long before, the state endeavored to exert an almost complete control over the land, by a system of individual allocation to

50 There is also the aura of luxury and prestige, which exerted an irresistible attraction, both material and mystical, upon the "barbarians" to the north of both the Chinese and the Roman Empires.

78 AIDAN SOUTHALL

every man and woman in every generation. It is generally held that this was impossible to achieve.51

I simply wish to draw attention to the fact that the Chinese state apparatus aimed at a thorough interference in the internal workings of the local agrarian community, which was certainly calculated to destroy any kin-based autono- mous community of direct producers. Yet, this situation arose quite naturally from one in which the autonomous communities were the accepted basis of society, through the long process of conversion of concentrated ritual power into centralized political power. Other forces contributed to the same end: the penetration of markets and local trade, the specialization of handicrafts, the mobilization of huge numbers of people on state labor projects and public works, all inimical to thriving local autonomy. On the other hand, the lowest ranking mandarin official governed a very large territory and population, making direct intervention and control at the most local level hardly possible; hence he was forced to rely on local notables. It is also relevant that there is much debate over the nature and distribution of lineage organization in China at different periods. But there is little doubt that in classical China gentry families were always attempting to get private control of land at the expense of the state, and that their mandarin members, though stationed far from home, participated in the same endeavor, at the expense of the official policy which they were supposed to pursue.

The net result was that China developed a local agrarian economy based on individual household families of direct producers, whether as owners or as tenants, rather than on locally autonomous kin groups with collective rights to land, although, of course, local kinship networks continued to exist.

Classical China may be seen as an example of the most advanced form of the Asiatic mode of production in two significant senses. First, it had devel- oped out of earlier forms that were structurally comparable to the Cola system of stage IV. Second, it developed a unified state economy supporting a unified state bureaucratic hierarchy, in complete contrast to the model of the feudal mode of production, which is a segmentary system of lords and vassals owning rent-producing landed estates that are also political jurisdictions linked in chains of superordination and subordination to one another.52

In the Chinese case, the "higher unity" was converted from a ritual entity into one that was fully political, transcending the earlier segmentary structure. This was possible, historically speaking, because trade had developed from early times within the state more than externally, whereas the feudal system in

51 D. C. Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T'ang Dynasty (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1963), 1-17, 124-39, 194-200.

52 Mark Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), 22: "The state retained a near monopoly over the means of force and so a true feudalism could never take hold."

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 79

Europe developed the other way around. The systemic collapse of the Roman Empire was more complete than any of the collapses between Chinese dynas- ties-where the same institutions were always eventually revived. This was quite beyond the capacity of the peoples who took over the Roman territory, as Charlemagne's mighty but unsuccessful attempt shows. In Europe, there- fore, trade revived before strong states became firmly established. Conse- quently developing states had to accommodate to merchants, markets, and towns, rather than exerting complete control. The resulting pluralistic econo- my was matched by the pluralistic political structure.

The notion of segmentary state does not belong to any specific mode of production, for it is a model constructed from a different perspective, relating primarily to the form and dynamics of the political structure. It seems to require some kind of local autonomy, whether of lordships in a feudal system, localized lineages in the Alur and Rajput examples, or various kinship and other local institutions as in the Cola case.

TRANSITION

I suggested that the stages outlined could be regarded as logical or mor- phological rather than evolutionary or, for that matter, revolutionary. But the question of transition cannot be evaded. The formulation of a theory of modes of production tends, through the limitations of words, to concentrate the suggestion of change between modes rather than within them, in a way that fails to conform with the flow of events in history.53 All experience must confirm that change is always occurring, though it may be faster or slower. Even according to the theory, change is always present in the potential contra- diction between the forces and relations of production, and in the develop- ment of both, which eventually leads to increasing contradiction.

Historical periods represented in the theory as transitions from one mode of production to another have to be seen as periods of the most rapid and significant change and are commonly referred to as revolutions. But even Marxist historians treat the transition from feudalism to capitalism as taking place over a very long period of several centuries, and there is little reason to suppose that other transitions would have been any more rapid. In recognition of this, revolution is sometimes treated as a conceptual rather than a iistorical category. Thus Zagarell says, "In contrast to the 'evolutionary' approaches, I will argue for a more revolutionary break between pre-state and state-orga- nized societies." He is attracted to the concept of "metastable equilibrium" where "disequilibrium leads to a sharp, radical transformation of the sys- tem." The sharp break, he says, is indicative of "structural discontinuity."

53 For example, M. Godelier, "D'un mode de production a l'autre: theorie de la transition," Recherches sociologiques, 12:2 (1981), 161-93.

80 AIDAN SOUTHALL

In the natural world "big bang" theories support the idea that processes can build up to rapid and "revolutionary" change.54

Similar considerations apply to Zagarell's hypothetical elaboration of pos- sible contradictions within kin organization. "These structural oppositions represent the context in which tribal polities are made and delimit the strategic options-conscious or unconscious-open to the participants in complex chiefdoms." Here the unsatisfactory notions of tribe and chiefdom are con- flated. "An essential, major contradiction haunting many chiefdoms is the

opposition of centralized government and the constraints of the dispersed power of kinship dominance." The position of the chief is contradictory, because he is committed to exercising power over the kin structure, yet his

power is in part an expression of his place in it. He is both collector and distributor, "caught between the necessity of generosity, in order to gain and retain community support, and the need to demand goods from his followers in order to expand his power," stoking rebellion by funding his authority, as Sahlins said of the "well developed chiefdom." Zagarell elaborates further contradictions based upon various alignments of four elements: (1) chief and central apparatus; (2) kin group leaders; (3) non-kin officials (appointed to counteract [2]); (4) the kin-organized masses. These yield opposing align- ments, such as: 1 + 2 + 3 versus 4; 1 + 3 versus 2 + 4; 1 + 2 versus 3 + 4; 1 + 2 + 4 versus 3; 1 + 4 versus 2 + 3 and so forth.55 These and analogous contradictions are implicit in the logical stages I outlined and need not be belabored further.

SCALE

I defined the segmentary state as one in which political sovereignty was

narrowly circumscribed and ritual suzerainty much more widely spread. In-

deed, the range of ritual suzerainty could be many magnitudes larger than that of political sovereignty. Is it then correct to contrast Cola as a segmentary state with Han or T'ang China as a unitary state? For China certainly had

pervasive ritual and cultural influence beyond its political borders, as in Central and Southeast Asia. On the other hand, a far-fetched case could be made for Cola as a unitary state within its core domain. But the Colas did not

regard this as their state. They regarded the whole vast territory under ritual

suzerainty as their state, and this was factually demonstrated by the inscrip- tions made by local authorities glorifying this state far beyond the boundaries of the core domain. China certainly regarded itself as reigning over the world, but it was also very clear about precisely which territories lay within its

54 It is a live issue: "The discovery last summer of a skeleton in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania has raised speculation that an abrupt speed-up in human evolution took place about 1.6 million years ago." New York Times Week in Review, 24 May 1987, 6.

55 Allen Zagarell, "Structural Discontinuity-a Critical Factor in the Emergence of Primary and Secondary States," Dialectical Anthropology, 10:2 (1986), 155, 157-60.

SEGMENTARY STATE IN AFRICA AND ASIA 8I

effective political jurisdiction. China did not regard the barbarians as being within the state but simply felt that, when they appeared, they should pay proper homage to China as the only state and civilization of serious worth. In Cola terms the whole state of China was its core domain. The contrast be- tween the small Cola core domain and large territory under ritual suzerainty, on the one hand, and the vast extent of China's political domain and the peripheral areas under its influence, on the other, seems valid.

Differences of scale do affect degrees of centralization. Ceteris paribus, it is easier for a small than for a very large state to centralize. William the Conqueror's England was a small but highly centralized feudal state, while the much larger realm of France was atomized. Eighteenth-century Prussia was a small, highly centralized state, while Germany, of which Prussia was nominally a part, had a long, hard struggle for unity. Bunyoro-Kitara was a very large, loose, segmentary state, while its small neighbor Buganda, over which it claimed an illusory suzerainty, developed through ecological advan- tages into an unusually centralized system.56 Ile-Ife, Ijebu-Ode, and other Yoruba polities in the West African rain forest, lacking riding or draft ani- mals, developed fairly small and centralized city-states, while further north in the open savannah, warrior horsemen created large but rather fragile states, the far-flung components of which retained considerable autonomy.

THE ADVANTAGES OF INTERREGIONAL

AND INTERDISCIPLINARY COMPARISON

One advantage of detailed comparisons among situations so different in scale and time as are the Alur, Rajput, and Cola cases is that the contrasting nature of the evidence from the one or the other has complementary aspects. To treat the recent Alur case as exemplifying an "earlier" form seems awkward, but its very recency permits a greater emphasis on ethnographic data and makes available living, personal, and occasionally eyewitness, circumstantial ac- counts of significant action and behavior.57 On the other hand, the wealth of archival and inscriptional data for Rajputs and Colas provides a kind of cumulative verification, however stereotyped or filtered it may sometimes be. To be sure, the Alur personal accounts cannot be taken to be necessarily true, for we know with what extraordinary rapidity the cultural filter transforms the perception of action. But they do still provide genuine views from inside the society and from informants both male and female and of both high and low status, which are nearer to action and behavior than most archives can be.

56 C. P. Kottak, "Ecological Variables in the Origin and Evolution of African States: The Buganda Example," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14:3 (1972), 351-80.

57 Such ethnographic information-even on practices that I could not witness or participate in, but learned about in detail from those who had actually lived them-may provide data on processes in a particular type of society that can illuminate the historical record of other times and places.

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The comparison raises many further interesting questions, such as whether a comparable hiving off process occurred among the Colas. My initial as- tonishment at Stein's boldness in translating an idea from African an- thropology to Indian history passed to a realization that he had paved the way for integrating a whole wide range of previously unrelated situations into a meaningful discourse. This integration breaks down the false conceptual bar- riers dividing regions and cultures studied by separate groups of scholars. It is especially salutary to overcome the intellectual and analytical isolation of African phenomena and to transcend the arrogance of regarding Indian culture as sui generis.