Edited by: Gary M. Feinman, Field Museum of Natural History, United States
Reviewed by: Scott G. Ortman, University of Colorado Boulder, United States; David Manuel Carballo, Boston University, United States
This article was submitted to Comparative Governance, a section of the journal Frontiers in Political Science
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Defining and examining democracy in non-Western contexts is a conceptual challenge. This is largely because scholars of contemporary political systems outside of anthropology can envision no alternative pathways other than Western expressions of democracy. Such thinking inhibits our understanding of past, and indeed future, democratic systems. In this paper, we argue that there is no such thing as a “democracy, ” but rather there are institutions that facilitate democratic governance. More specifically, we argue that in Indigenous North America “keystone institutions” facilitated complex institutional arrangements and broad participation by a citizenry in the distribution of power and authority. While these characteristics define such Western democratic institutions as the Athenian assembly, the Icelandic Althing, or the U.S. Congress, we argue that comparable keystone institutions of governance can be identified across Indigenous North America. To illustrate these points, we provide a series of cases that demonstrate the variability in the forms that democratic keystone institutions might take. We specifically focus on axes of variability related to the scale and scope of participation facilitated by each institution, the degree to which the institutions distribute power equitably, and the complexity and formality of the institutional arrangements held together by the keystone institution. Importantly, we argue that the concept of the keystone institution as an analytical tool for seeking out the emergence and role of democratic forms of governance transcends the utility of dichotomous categories such as Western/non-Western or state/non-state that limit productive comparative frameworks and the inclusion of non-traditional case studies of democracy in global conversations.
Conventional scholarship places the beginnings of democracy in the West (Muhlberger and Paine,
The inclusion of non-Western expressions of democracy within broader intellectual discourse remains a conceptual challenge, largely because scholars of contemporary political systems continue to argue that there are “no democratic alternatives to what is routinely called the Western model of democracy, only non-democratic ones” (Alexander,
As a response to such conceptual constraints, researchers of comparative politics have routinely focused on long-established conceptions of core democratic principles such as the rule of law, popular sovereignty, and freedom or liberty as important foundations for democratic theorizing (Chou and Beausoleil,
In this article, we review and compare the historical contexts, development, characteristics, and mechanics of institutions of democratic governance across four regions of Indigenous North America. While recently scholars have issued challenges to Western-centric narratives of democracy, few have considered the institutions of non-state societies as forms of democratic governance. Such institutions are often relegated to processes of “cooperation” or “egalitarianism” in the context of studies that seek to illuminate the development of generalized human behaviors (e.g., Trigger,
One of the main challenges that we wish to overcome is the tendency to apply generalizations of what is or is not democratic that, based on varying and often changing criteria, are at times either overly ambiguous or wildly constraining. Such definitions may depend on systems of representation, notions of liberty and freedom, or in some cases the presence of institutions that facilitate direct vote. These debates and descriptions often regard democracy as a characteristic of society. We argue, however, that democracy in this regard does not exist. Rather, there are only institutions, organizations of people that carry out objectives using regularized practices and norms, labor, and resources (Holland-Lulewicz et al.,
Herein the remainder of this article, we first review the major tenets of an institutional approach and introduce the concept of the keystone institution, with particular attention to its utility in exploring forms of governance. We then provide four case studies from across Indigenous North America with the goal of formally comparing the roles and histories of democratic keystone institutions within a range of non-Western, non-state institutional arrangements. More specifically, we argue that democratic institutions often emerge as keystone institutions that serve to integrate, manage, and maintain complex institutional constellations. Finally, we pose that the concept of the keystone institution as an analytical tool for describing the emergence, roles, and variability of democratic forms of governance is useful in transcending the utility of dichotomous categories that limit more inclusive comparative frameworks.
Institutions are defined here as organizations of people that carry out objectives using regularized practices and norms, labor, and resources (Holland-Lulewicz et al.,
Beyond individual institutions however, the real power of an institutional approach lies in its recognition that the properties of individual institutions are just as important to understand as the overall arrangement of institutions, the complexity and form of their arrangement, and the ways they articulate with one another in broad institutional constellations. Indeed, Kowalewski and Birch (
Societies are typically composed of a range of institutions that deal with distinct realms of decision-making and objectives (Bondarenko et al.,
Drawing on our four cases from across Indigenous North America, we pose that forms of governance can be analyzed, measured, and defined by their roles as “keystone institutions.” Of course, many institutions that may be considered keystone institutions might not facilitate the democratic forms of interaction described above (e.g., the totalitarian state from Kowalewski and Birch,
In the following North American case studies, we illustrate instances in which keystone institutions emerged and served to integrate complex institutional constellations that, in turn, facilitated “democracy.” In each case, democratic arrangements of institutions emerged that encouraged broad governance through the effective linking and cross-cutting of component institutions. In the southeast, councils emerged across Muskogean-speaking communities as a way to integrate disparate decision-making institutions at multiple sociopolitical scales. Among Northern Iroquoian societies in the northeast, an intricate clan system served as the socio-structural architecture for democratically-based institutions of governance. Across the Puebloan Southwest, a network of religious sodalities emerged as a way to integrate diverse populations and disperse sociopolitical power. And in the Coast Salish region of the northwest, we explore a case where keystone institutions were situational, neither fixed in time nor space, but durable nonetheless, tied to the potlatches hosted by multi-family corporate Houses, events that served to regulate and make possible a system of decentralized, autonomous institutions. For each case, we review the mechanics of each institution as keystone institutions, and the materiality of these institutions, namely architecture, that would have facilitated and inscribed the actual institutionalization of democratic practice.
Today, the Muscogee Nation lies within the bounds of the modern state of Oklahoma. However, for thousands of years, Ancestral Muskogean peoples occupied the Southern Appalachian region and south through the modern states of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. Ancestral Muskogean refers to both the people who lived in this region and who spoke various forms of the Muskogean language family. Because many of these groups built and used councils as a form of governance and as an institution of consensus-building, we refer to the genealogies of these institutions as Ancestral Muskogean, though we use archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic accounts of councils from sources primarily derived from members and ancestors of the Muscogee Nation specifically (see Thompson et al.,
Chaudhuri and Chaudhuri's (
Council houses are circular in form and range between 12 and 37 m in diameter, able to host hundreds of people (Thompson,
We argue that the council emerged as a keystone institution in the sixth century CE and continues to serve to organize a complicated entanglement of disparate, situational decision-making bodies (Thompson et al.,
As Chaudhuri and Chaudhuri (
In Ancestral Muskogean societies, councils served as keystone institutions that bound together and negotiated collective action among potentially competing realms of situational decision-making (i.e., households, lineages, Tribal towns, regions, clans). As institutions, they provide a political space for participants within a given network (or set of nested networks) to come together to participate in the process of government. Representatives are drawn from and represent cross-cutting lineages, clans, households, and communities, with the result that each were (and are) represented within the council as a whole. Voices are heard, discussed, and considered until consensus is reached. As the
The term Northern Iroquoian refers to both a linguistic group and a cultural pattern shared by populations who historically occupied the Lower Great Lakes, Finger Lakes, and Susquehanna and St. Lawrence River Valleys of northeastern North America. These groups were primarily the ancestors of the contemporary Huron-Wendat Nation, Nations formerly comprising the Haudenosaunee confederacy, and various Wyandot communities in Canada and the United States. From the seventeenth century onwards, Europeans referred to these societies as the Huron, Iroquois, Erie, Neutral, and Susquehannock, although other Iroquoian-speaking populations were also present in the eastern North American landscape.
Prior to the colonial era, Northern Iroquoians lived in villages comprised of longhouses, often surrounded by palisade walls. The longhouse-based extended family was the basic unit of production and consumption. Longhouses were occupied by groups of related women, together with their spouses and children. Titles and names were inherited through the female line and although matrilocal residence was the norm, males in high-ranking lineages remained in their natal homes (Trigger,
Clans did not govern in and of themselves. Rather, they structured the function of institutions of interdependence and governance throughout the Iroquoian world. As such, the social and structural architecture of good government (as per Blanton et al.,
The clan as a social-structural construct likely emerged in the Archaic period (~8,000–1,000 BC) of the eastern Woodlands in order to facilitate relations among social groups spread widely across the landscape (Anderson,
As keystone institutions, clans structured participation in institutions of governance. Leadership was heritable within clans and both male and female positions of authority were associated with names passed down from generation to generation within the clan (Wonderley and Sempowski,
Each clan segment had civil and military leaders who sat on political councils that discussed and made decisions about domestic and external affairs at multiple social and spatial scales. Among both the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee, clans historically controlled seats on the confederacy council (Tooker,
The social-structural groupings of clans into moieties and phratries permitted larger-scale divisions for ceremonial and political reasons. Moieties allowed multiple clans to come together to form a dual division. Phratries functioned in essentially the same way but split the population into three groups. The Relation of 1648 suggests that there were “three principal Captains” of the Huron-Wendat, an interpretation bolstered by later historic sources (Steckley,
Totalizing, strongly centralized institutions are less effective than cross-cutting and interdependent institutions when it comes to achieving societal goals (Kowalewski and Birch,
The Puebloan towns of the southwestern U.S. are concentrated, and have been so for over 1,000 years, in the four corners region, though primarily across northeastern and east-central Arizona and northwestern and west-central New Mexico. At the time of European contact in the sixteenth century, across dozens of towns, seven mutually unintelligible languages from four unique language groups were being spoken, six of these languages continue to be spoken today among contemporary Puebloan towns (Ware,
Generally, Puebloan towns can be split into the Eastern and Western Pueblos. The Western Pueblos of eastern Arizona (e.g., Hopi) and west-central New Mexico (e.g., Zuni) remained primarily bound together through systems of kin over many generations. The Eastern Pueblos along the Rio Grande river however, saw the de-emphasis of kin-based institutions in favor of a system of non-kin-based sodalities at some point in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, though they may have played key roles within these Puebloan societies as early as the seventh or eighth century (Ware,
There existed, and still exist, dozens of sodalities, each tasked with particular ritual and/or secular responsibilities. Most of these sodalities have a home pueblo, that is, the origins of particular sodalities can be traced back to particular pueblos, where the secret knowledge requisite for membership continues to be held (Ware,
General consensus among archaeologists posits that sodalities emerged as important keystone institutions sometime between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their function was to regulate agricultural and irrigation systems, organize political affairs, and integrate diverse populations coalescing in large aggregate towns (Dozier,
It is likely that ranked descent groups emerged as small farming villages grew throughout the eighth century, and as more groups coalesced, a system of ranking developed based on seniority (Ware,
Once central to holding together the complex array of institutional arrangements that defined Puebloan societies, sodalities became responsible for rituals, secular decision-making, rain and water control, curing illness, controlling witchcraft, success in hunting and warfare, maintaining social conformity, and the initiation of youth among many others (Ware,
Sodality membership itself is often voluntary, with membership not determined by kinship or residence. As such, the latent function of such groups is to explicitly and effectively bind together those belonging to different residential groups and lineages (Ware,
As Ware points out, “cross-culturally, sodalities thrive in multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic contexts, where interethnic relationships need to be continually negotiated and potential conflicts mediated” (Ware,
Societies of the Northwest Coast of North America, and particularly those of the Coast Salish region of southwestern British Columbia and northwestern Washington, offer another useful example of democratic currents in Indigenous governance. The political systems in place at the time of contact with European nation states, and likely for centuries if not millennia preceding that contact (Angelbeck and Grier,
Coast Salish politics have been described by Angelbeck and Grier (
Among the Coast Salish groups, systems of social hierarchy were far less formalized than among other groups of the coast (Suttles,
Households were thus the key institutions in regional politics, being connected to other households via a complex and decentralized network of local and regional ties established through both the movement of families across households (Coupland et al.,
Less explored in such analyses of decentralized forms of governance are the mechanisms that can and have coordinated heterogenous and heterarchical networks of autonomous actors. As Grier and Angelbeck (
However, a broader read of the ethnographic record of the potlatch reveals how it provided the institutional framework for Coast Salish political engagement, coordinated action, and resource management in service of both collective and individual ends. Suttles (
The rationale behind this view—potlatch as governance—lies in the breadth of functions it performed. As an assembly of individuals and political factions, it provided an arena for the assertion and validation of status claims and rights to property. In the context of the potlatch, conflicts were resolved (and sometimes initiated), debts repaid, marriages transacted, deaths recognized, and leadership positions affirmed. Importantly, this process was collective and democratic, in that the validation of changes to the social order asserted by the host came through their acceptance by those in attendance, as signaled through their voluntary participation in the ceremonial proceedings and collective witnessing of the outcomes. In this sense, the potlatch can be thought of as a kind of situational Congress in which legal titles and rights were claimed, established and regulated, and thus society more broadly was reproduced. Importantly, potlatches, the households that hosted them, and the diverse and autonomous constituents bound together through participation in these events, served the role of keystone institution in periodically reaffirming the articulation of institutions that formed the decentralized arrangement of Coast Salish societies.
None of this is to discount the notion that the potlatch acted as an arena of status competition that could simultaneously serve the interests of the wealthy and privileged, reinforcing structural inequalities in Northwest Coast societies. Indeed, giveaways of wealth at potlatches provided elevated status for those who arranged and hosted the event, which in turn offered opportunities to build additional wealth. In this sense, the existence of a keystone institution that promoted broad-based and consensus-driven governance did not stave off inequalities in society, underscoring the perhaps timeless reality that politics, wealth, and inequality are difficult to disentangle even when institutions of “good governance” prevail.
The diversity of functions the potlatch served strongly points to its character not as an event, but as an institution-of-the-moment hosted within and by particular Houses, and as a central regulatory node in Coast Salish society and in Northwest Coast societies more broadly. The “true nature” of the potlatch has been intensely debated in anthropological circles for well over a century, but the more holistic view of this institution reveals it to be both inclusive and foundational to inclusive governance. In this way, households were critical in facilitating the participation of many families, households, and community leaders in the process of governance through the integration of regularly autonomous institutions, consistent with functions and properties of a democratic keystone institution.
In the previous section, we detailed the mechanics, characteristics, and contexts of democratic keystone institutions and processes as manifest across four Indigenous North American regions. These were, and in some cases continue to serve as, institutions that bound together complex institutional constellations. Though each of the keystone institutions we describe are unique and function in very specific, historically situated ways, there are important similarities and differences that can illuminate substantive characteristics of the kinds of institutions that facilitate democratic forms of governance. We focus here specifically on comparing across axes of variation related to (1) degrees of centralization and formalization, (2) aspects of participation, both breadth and kind, and (3) the equitability of power distribution afforded by institutional arrangements and the particular ways these arrangements are articulated through keystone institutions.
Each of the keystone institutions reviewed here exhibit varying degrees and qualities of centralization. On the one hand, each serves as the metaphorical center of particular institutional arrangements. On the other hand, not one of these democratic institutions materializes as a single, autonomous, centralized institution in the same way that we might think of a federal government or other bureaucratic entity (e.g., a congress or national assembly, or “the state.”). Ancestral Muskogean councils, Northern Iroquoian clans, Puebloan sodalities, and Coast Salish houses through the hosting of potlatches, all serve as integrative institutions in one way or another. Although manifesting at different social and spatial scales, each is central to institutional arrangements in that these keystone institutions offer the organizational blueprint or tether for disparate institutions to coalesce to make decisions and confer with one another, or in some cases to explicitly challenge threats to such collective endeavors. In this sense, all of the keystone institutions described here are the basic building-blocks of these processes. Nevertheless, the way that these processes unfold, and the forms of centralization (or decentralization) facilitated, vary substantially.
Ancestral Muskogean councils are materially central, as places where integrative and collective activities explicitly occur. At the same time, there is no single council. The council as an institution is replicated across social and spatial scales. There are village councils, local councils serving multiple villages, and larger regional councils drawing representation from many scales and institutions. While there existed a scalar hierarchy that may give the guise of a centrally integrated system of councils, no such vertical integration or hierarchical/subordinate system existed. In any case, centralization of decision-making occurred at many scales across many materialized “centers.”
For Northern Iroquoian society, there were many overlapping institutions of governance, each designed to deal with particular social and political realms (e.g., war councils, civic councils, intra-clan governance at multiple socio-spatial scales). The social architecture of governance was distributed horizontally across clans and centralized institutions of decision-making drew differentially from clans, moieties, and phratries, ensuring representation of multiple voices and constituencies. These complex arrangements of relationships provided a strong web of overlapping institutions that at once produced unique, functional epicenters of decision-making, but that, at the same time, regulated against the emergence of a single, centralized body of consensus-building. Such a body of collective decision-making was decidedly dispersed across the many constituent parts of a democratic whole.
The materialization (or non-materialization) of this political model is consistent with clans as keystone institutions over a centralized governing body. Indeed, no specialized architecture was associated with governing. Instead, council meetings and other forms of assembly occurred within the long-houses of particular leaders, usually those from the lineages from which particular council leadership positions were drawn. This is not unlike the assemblies congregated within Coast Salish plank houses by households. The decentralized democracies of the Northwest Coast were dispersed in a similar fashion. In place of clans, households served as the epicenters where collective governance occurred. Instead of hosting formal councils, houses hosted potlatches that served a similar, if less formalized role as councils. In Northern Iroquoia, the permanence of governance structures was imbued in the clan system, not the councils themselves. It would seem that councils, without attendant architecture symbolizing their formalization and permanence, existed only when in session or situationally. Similarly, the integrative governance of the Coast Salish existed only through actual practice, the hosting of a potlatch-as-Congress or -council, not simply as an event.
The sodalities of the Puebloan Southwest, similar to the wide networks of horizontally articulated institutions of Northern Iroquoia, comprised a mostly decentralized system of governance in the sense that power and participation were dispersed across organizational units, including specific sodalities or moieties and within and across specific communities. Sodalities served as the most important institutions of governance within Puebloan communities and drew membership from across disparate lineages, households, clans, and moieties. The sodalities themselves were similar to the system of Northern Iroquoian councils, each with requisite responsibilities. Though unlike Northern Iroquoian councils, sodalities were highly formalized through attendant architecture, namely kivas. Kivas served as permanent, formalized places for legitimizing and validating the system of sodalities and thus for allowing the integration and articulation of complex institutional arrangements. The existence of these Puebloan sodalities allowed the formation of relationships that crosscut familial and residence-based institutions and funneled social and political power across a distributed network of secret societies.
Just as no single, all encompassing, centralized political entity emerges in any of these cases, the same can be said for leadership positions. As organizations of individuals bound together to achieve a common purpose, none of the keystone institutions described here include autocratic leadership, nor do they allow for such roles to emerge across other institutions. There are certainly important individuals imbued with responsibility, held up by reputation, regarded highly, and who have even accumulated a disproportionately large amount of wealth. In all cases, however, leadership is either limited to the constraints placed on them by the wider institutional body (e.g., the council, checks and balances across sodalities) or distributed across a diverse range of decision-making institutions and confined to wielding any amount of authority within narrowly defined realms (e.g., war councils, women's councils, household matters, etc.). Indeed, a defining feature of the institutional arrangements described here is the distribution of authority across institutions, facilitated by the keystone institution itself. These keystone institutions, while central to broader institutional function, work to distribute power across institutional arrangements.
In the case of Northern Iroquoian politics, leadership and authority are beholden to the councils within which they serve and to their constituents (e.g., the clan members, usually women, who elevated them to leadership roles). Across Muskogean councils, the mekko is a specific role within the institution of the council. In this way, leadership is distributed across sociospatial scales, from village councils through regional councils and down through particular households and lineages. In any case, mekkos serve primarily as executors and promoters of the decisions reached through council-based consensus. Like Northern Iroquoian leaders, there exists no objective, external source of power.
Similarly, “House Chiefs” of the northwestern coast are representatives of their houses. In fact, they are merely the largest stake-holding member of the house, owning the majority of the estate, but not the entire house. Like the Northern Iroquoian or Ancestral Muskogean leaders in the examples we describe here, such authority is replicated and distributed across institutions, in this case households. Like Northern Iroquoian politics, such distributed authority is materialized through the role of the house as both domestic space and political epicenter, unlike the central, specialized architecture of Ancestral Muskogean councils (though in some cases the council houses of the southeast have been referred to as the “chief's house, ” metaphorically). While authority shifts between houses throughout different events and times, it remains situationally distributed.
In none of the cases described here is participation completely equitable, neither in access to participation nor in the character of that participation. In the case of the Puebloan Southwest, sodalities are the heart of governance. While they drew membership from across familial and residential institutions, and extended beyond community boundaries as a system of pan-Puebloan socio-ritual networks, binding together households, lineages, clans, and communities, participation in this system is actually quite limited to a small subset of the citizenry. Those serving in these secret societies, within which power and authority are vested, may have numbered on average only fifty individuals for each community (Ware,
In the case of both Ancestral Muskogean and Northern Iroquoian systems, leaders served as specific representatives of the institutions bound together through the keystone institutions. In the southeast, councils were populated by members from across households, lineages, clans, and towns, representatives of the membership of each of these constituent institutions. Similarly, in the northeast, the clan system ensured that participation was widely distributed across residential and familial units, with direct representation of institutional members by specific leadership from those institutions. While lacking these more formal systems of ensuring wide participation, participation in Coast Salish potlatches was similarly wide, if not wider in regards to the percentage of the total population participating. That said, in the absence of such formalization, leadership remained mostly
The democratic, keystone institutions described here are a subset of institutions that served to aggregate disparate preferences and positionalities into equitable social choice (sensu Coleman and Ferejohn,
JH-L and VT contributed to conception and design of the study. JH-L wrote the first draft of the manuscript. JB and CG wrote the Northern Iroquoian and Northwest case study sections respectively. VT and JB contributed heavy editing to the full draft. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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We would like to thank the editorial team, Gary Feinman, Steve Kowalewski, Richard Blanton, and Lane Fargher for putting together this excellent special issue and for allowing us the opportunity to contribute. This article was much improved by reviewer feedback and we thank them for the opportunity to respond.