Chiefdom

A chiefdom is a form of political and social organization intermediate in scale and complexity between an egalitarian tribal society and a fully centralized state, in which authority is concentrated in a hereditary or otherwise legitimated chief who commands respect and limited coercive power over multiple communities, without the specialized bureaucratic apparatus of a state. Anthropologists, notably Elman Service and Marshall Sahlins in their influential mid-twentieth-century typologies of political evolution, identified the chiefdom as a distinct stage characterized by social ranking and redistribution of resources through the chief, often with a degree of institutionalized inequality absent in simpler band and tribal societies. Historical and ethnographically documented chiefdoms have been identified across Polynesia, parts of Africa, pre-Columbian North America and elsewhere, and the concept remains a widely used comparative category in political anthropology.