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Over most of the world, the conversion from foraging for food to producing food led to denser populations with reduced ability to move from place to place. Denser populations, in turn, would have increased the frequency and seriousness of disputes, and therefore also the need to impose dispute resolution. That normally takes place through some system of councils, chiefs, or kings (although the exact meanings of those convenient terms obviously vary from case to case). Although not all settled human communities have exhibited strongly centralized leadership —the so-called “acephalous” societies like the Hopi or the BaMbuti did not— a surprisingly large proportion have. Archaeology and history tell us of countless kingdoms headed by “absolute” rulers, who made binding decisions that could not be appealed, and who had life-and-death power over their subjects.
From their earliest emergence, it was normal for kingdoms to exhibit extreme “class” differentiation between the ruler (and the ruler’s kin) and the subjects (often with slaves at the very bottom). The differentiation was celebrated and justified with elaborate rituals and supporting myths.
No such absolutist kingdoms survive today, but traces of them survived long enough into the twentieth century to allow a few ethnographers to reconstruct much of what they were like. Perhaps nowhere were early kingdoms more clearly differentiated into rulers and subjects than in the states of the upper Nile region in and around what is today Uganda. We will consider one of these states: Bunyoro, “the land of the Nyoro.”
The goal of the present text is to describe three ways in which the Nyoro sustained the central and overwhelming power of the monarch and coordinated political control of a large region and vast population. We will consider how rituals and myths sustained the political organization of the kingdom. Both myth and ceremonial are part of the process of “mystification.” (Click for More about Mystification in a separate tab.)
Myth, as we shall examine it here, provides a widely believed history of the Nyoro people, including the incidents that eternally allocate leadership to the dynasty in power at the time of Beattie’s study. [Click for Note 1. Click the note to hide it again.]
1 Myths and legends are stories of real or fictitious events in the past, often relevant to the history of a social group or to the origins of the things and customs of the world as we know it. The term myth is usually associated with such stories when they are religious and when they relate in some way to the broader human condition. Tales of the creation of the universe are usually classed as myths. Our particular interest in this case will be “charter myths,” those involved in justifying political order.
Ritual, in this case, will include all those symbolic and ceremonial representations that set the monarch off from ordinary people and represent, or even create, his right to rule over them and his obligation to care for them. [Click Note 2. Click the note to hide it again.]
2 Some writers find it useful to distinguish rituals, which are religious, from ceremonies, which are non-religious. In most human societies the distinction is difficult to make with perfect clarity. In the context of the present discussion the distinction is best ignored.
Political organization among the Nyoro was arguably an instance of what might, in comparative perspective, be called “feudalism,” and an examination of this case provides an opportunity to explore one of the several ways in which a large, pre-modern state could maintain reasonable order. [Click for Note 3. Click the note to hide it again.]
3 “Feudalism” is a troubled but often useful term for a system in which “vassals” are granted plots of territory by a “lord” in exchange for political and economic support.
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