Introduction

This paper focuses on the processes and conditions that promote the perpetuation of centralized, but nonbureaucratic, authority. Patterns of leadership variability in uncentralized tribal societies are first examined, using examples from South American ethnography. The growth of central leadership in such systems is seen to be closely linked to the internal forces of factional development as well as to the external dynamics of interfactional and inter-community relations. The paper then discusses how the kind of achieved authority some call “big-man” leadership – a short-term phenomenon tied to a particular individual's political career – could be transformed into a permanent, institutionalized chiefly office in the trajectory of long-term (inter-generational) social reproduction. It is proposed that such a transformation, to be successful, requires the expansion, regularization, and close articulation of both the internal and the external dimensions of central leadership. The general points of the discussion are then applied to archaeological data from Barinas, Venezuela.

Leadership dynamics in uncentralized societies

Anthropologists are showing increasing interest in patterns of social differentiation in uncentralized societies, those that lack formal institutions of central authority. Social status in such systems is based primarily on achievement during the course of an individual's lifetime, rather than on ascription at birth (Sillitoe 1978; Paynter and Cole 1980; Keesing 1983; Spencer 1987). And since the degree of one's success is strongly influenced by such factors as personal intelligence, charisma, motivation, energy, social relations, and luck, the result can be a highly variable set of individual statuses over the short term.