- acephalous societies
- communities with no formal positions of leadership.
- age sets
- gendered groups of people of roughly the same age who play a distinctive role in society with important social obligations and abilities. Age-grade systems tend to be associated with acephalous societies.
- Arab Spring
- a series of protests that spread throughout the Arab world in the early 2010s, demanding an end to oppressive government and poor living conditions.
- asafo
- in Akan societies, the group of young men charged with protecting the town, performing public works, and representing public opinion. Asafo could depose corrupt and unpopular chiefs.
- authority
- the exercise of power based on expertise, charisma, or roles of leadership.
- band societies
- communities of gatherer-hunters in which leadership is temporary, situational, and informal.
- big man
- an informal leader who has gained power by accumulating wealth, sponsoring feasts, and helping young men pay bride wealth.
- centralized societies
- communities in which power is concentrated in formal positions of authority, such as chiefs or kings.
- chief
- the inherited office of leadership in a chiefdom, combining coercive forms of economic, political, judicial, military, and religious authority.
- chiefdoms
- societies in which political leadership is regionally organized through an affiliation or hierarchy of chiefs. Chiefdoms are associated with intensive agriculture, militarism, and religious ideologies.
- chinampas
- agricultural plots created from layers of mud and vegetation in the shallow part of a lake.
- clans
- large kin groups that trace their descent from a common ancestor who is either not remembered or possibly mythological.
- coercive power
- the ability to enforce judgments and commands using socially sanctioned violence.
- colonial states
- state governments imposed by foreigners to rule over local peoples.
- failed state
- a state that cannot perform any of the essential functions of a state.
- fragile state
- a state government that cannot adequately perform the essential functions of a state, such as maintaining law and order, building basic infrastructure, guaranteeing basic amenities, and defending its citizens against violence.
- hegemony
- a powerful ideology that has become generally accepted by most groups in society as common sense. Hegemony emphasizes the norms and values that support the existing social order.
- ideology
- an organized set of ideas associated with a particular group or class in society. Ideologies are used to explain how various realms of nature and society work, including such realms as economics, politics, religion, kinship, gender, and sexuality.
- imagined communities
- citizens of a nation-state joined together by rituals and practices that give them a collective, imagined sense of community.
- king
- hereditary ruler of a multiethnic empire based on a chiefdom.
- leopard-skin chief
- an informal mediator in Nuer society who negotiated settlement in the case of homicide.
- lineage orders
- societies in which extended family groups provide the primary means of social integration. Leadership in these societies is provided by elders and other temporary or situational figures.
- nation
- a sense of cultural belonging or peoplehood based on a common language, common origin story, common destiny, and common norms and values. National identities are actively constructed by states.
- nation-state
- a political institution joining the apparatus of the state with the notion of cultural belonging or peoplehood.
- parrhesia
- courageous public speech inspired by a moral desire to reveal the truth and demand social change.
- persuasive power
- the ability to influence others without any formal means of enforcement.
- political economy
- study of the ways in which political and economic realms continually reinforce and sometimes contradict one another over time.
- politics
- all elements of the sociocultural dynamics of power
- postcolonial studies
- an interdisciplinary field that combines history, anthropology, political science, and area studies in an effort to understand the diversity, complexity, and legacy of colonialism throughout the world.
- power
- the ability to influence people and/or shape social processes and social structures.
- proto-states
- societies that exhibit some but not all of the features of state societies.
- reform
- the call for systemic changes to address social problems.
- resistance
- the expression of disagreement or dissatisfaction with the social order; may be explicit or implicit.
- revolution
- the replacement of one social order with a different one, often to create enhanced justice, equality, stability, or freedom.
- segmentary lineage
- a kind of lineage order in which family units called minimal lineages are encompassed by larger groups called maximal lineages, which are subsumed by even larger groups called clans.
- social movement
- an organized set of actions by a group outside of government aiming at achieving social change.
- social stratification
- the division of society into groups that are ranked according to wealth, power, or prestige.
- state societies
- large, stratified, multiethnic societies with highly centralized leadership, bureaucracies, systems of social control, and military forces exerting exclusive control over a defined territory.
- tribal societies
- an older term used by anthropologists to refer to pastoralist and horticulturalist societies in which extended family structures provide the primary means of social integration.
- tribe
- an old-fashioned term used to describe ethnic groups or groups organized by lineage. Avoided by many anthropologists now because of connotations of primitivism and groupthink.
- village democracies
- acephalous societies in which an array of social groups provide arenas for discussion and consensus.