How do political organisations of simple societies establish power, authority and legitimacy?

The three terms

• Power is the ability to make others act, by force, gift, or threat. Yanomami village leaders and Amazon headmen often have little command power.
• Authority, after Max Weber, is the recognised right to command. A Nuer leopard-skin chief has ritual office more than a sword.
• Legitimacy is why people accept that right: descent, blessing, success in raid, or the sense that custom is as it should be.

How organisation works

• Bands, as among many Andaman and foraging groups, use consensus, ridicule, and fission. Leadership is situational hunting or ritual skill.
• Tribes use segmentary lineage. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer show opposition of segments, prophets, and leopard-skin mediators rather than a pyramid.
• Chiefdoms concentrate redistribution. Malinowski’s Trobriand chiefs convert yams and kula into rank. Leach’s Kachin gumsa chiefs claim hereditary prestige that can collapse into gumlao equality.
• Big-man systems, as Marshall Sahlins described in Melanesia, build power by giving pigs and speeches. Authority dies with the man’s network.

Sources of legitimacy

• Kinship and first-comer myths. Ritual and oracles. Success in war and feast. Weber’s traditional and charismatic types fit better than legal-rational bureaucracy.
• Pierre Clastres argued that Amazon polities work to prevent a separate state. Refusal of surplus command is itself a political act.
• Colonial and missionary offices later recoded legitimacy. Simple does not mean outside history.