The Political Organization of the Tainos

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The political organization of the tainos The Political structure of the Taino is one that showed patterns common in most parts of the world. When the island was settled it was an egalitarian society. The simple settlement patterns and burial items can attest to this. The evidence of shamanism also is evidence of an egalitarian society putting the basis of their spiritual life on the individual. When the Spaniards arrived what they found was a complex chiefdom. The production of institutionalized inequality is the establishment of social inequality. Social inequality is defined “…as unequal or asymmetrical relations of power between members of groups or a society.”(Siegel 1999) Institutionalizing inequality is when power is passed down though inheritance and is no longer based on one’s own merit. The source of power can be classified into two groups, objective and symbolic power. Objective power comes from the physical components of a culture. The Symbolic Power comes from ideological and religious components of a culture. These two sources of power are very closely related, even so that they share similar traits. The development and establishment of complex chiefdoms can take on several forms. To explain the different ways that complex societies can come about archaeologists have made two theories, conflict and contract theory. Conflict theory states that when problems arise with in a society the political structure will become stronger to resolve conflict. The stratified population is kept stratified due to the unequal distribution of critical resources. Now conflict theory says that the reason complex societies develop is because the people who can gain control over critical resources will use the distribution of those resources to control the population. “The strength of their power is determined by the degree to which they truly control the
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