Chiefdom as a Concept of Sociology: The Complexity of Interpretation

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify the reasons which limit the conceptualization of the concept of chiefdom, and to find analytical means to overcome it. The author notes that at the present time sociology has developed criteria which facilitate the understanding of chiefdom as a type of social organization and historical stage in the development of society. However, the process of developing an unambiguous interpretation of the concept of chiefdom has not yet been completed. The article suggests that this is a consequence of two main limitations. The first of these lies outside the field of science and is associated with the diversity of the morphology of chiefdoms, with them having accumulated signs of “higher” and “lower” forms of social organization, and with chiefdom being characterized by ambiguity of data. The second limitation is brought forth by science itself, which happened to attach different conceptual grids to various types of chiefdom and had been unable to solve the problem of polysemia of the concepts which underlie the methodological analysis of archaic societies. The author focuses on the problem of “semantic twins” of chiefdom, the existence of which is due to the established tradition of word usage. The problem of identifying such “twins” is solved based on analyzing the social institutions and structures of ancient societies, while relying on the results of archaeological and anthropological studies, texts of literary artifacts. As a result, the author argues that in many cases the barbaric “kingdom” of Western Europe, Asia and Africa, the Eastern European “principalities” and the “empires” of Central Asia and Central America should be called chiefdoms. It is concluded that managing conceptual space allows for expanding the subject field of analysis, enriching the analytical tools of research and as a result discovering new facets of chiefdom as a form of social organization.