Talk:Chiefdom

I think this recent edit by Jaredb is redundant, since the paragraph below already explains that chiefdoms are intermediate between tribes and states. Furthermore, the statement that "social relations were based mainly on kinship, marriage, decent, age, generation, and gender just as they were in bands and tribes" is unnecessary, because those are human universals and are not distinctive of chiefdom organization. Therefore, I am going to remove the edit. I welcome discussion if there is disagreement. TriNotch 23:56, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

nice article
i really like this article. it is succinct and covers the main points. chiefdoms are notoriously hard to define because of the variability and cycling that is described in the article. i wonder if it would be good to add several short examples of chiefdoms (maybe three: a classic chiefdom, a minimal or simple chiefdom, and a maximal or complex chiefdom) to show this variability along the short themes of settlement patterns, social organization, and ideation. what do you all think? cheers, Mumun 00:06, 23 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Glad you like the article. Your idea sounds great.  Go ahead, particularly if you can add some citations for the examples.  Or, alternately, someone could develop these examples in separate Wiki articles, and then we could link to them as good examples.  TriNotch 00:23, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I notice that your academic focus is the Mumum pottery period of Korea; from that article I see that Deokcheon-ni and Igeum-dong are examples of chiefdoms. Perhaps articles on those sites could serve the purpose?  If not, the sites of the Mississippian culture could help. TriNotch 00:30, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Carneiro
Recent edits by an anonymous user added a very good definition from Carneiro's work, but simultaneously changed the introductory line. The new introduction did not permit the colloquial meaning of chiefdom (i.e. a community led by a chief). I have retained the useful Carneiro edit but returned the intro line to its previous state. TriNotch 02:49, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Chiefdom of Khitan(AD 300-AD 1211)
References to the Khitan in Chinese sources date back to the fourth century. Ancestors of the Khitan were the Yuwen clan of the Xianbei, an ethnic group situated in the area covered by the modern Liaoning province. After their regime was conquered by the Murong clan, the remnants scattered in the modern-day Inner Mongolia and mixed there with the original Mongolic population..

Chiefdom of Jin(1115-1234)
The Jīn Dynasty (Jurchen: Anchu, Aisin Gurun; Chinese: 金朝; pinyin: Jīn Cháo), also known as the Jurchen Dynasty, was founded by the Wanyan (Chinese:完顏 pinyin:Wányán) clan of the Jurchens, the ancestors of the Manchus who established the Qing Dynasty some 500 years late.

The name Jurchen dates back to at least the beginning of the tenth century, when the Balhae kingdom was destroyed by the Khitans. However, cognate ethnonyms like Sushen have been recorded in pre-Christian Era geographical works like the Shan Hai Jing and Book of Wei. It comes from the Jurchen word jušen, the original meaning of which is unclear. It is a curious fact that in Manchu, the linear descendant of Jurchen, jušen occurs in many compounds denoting "slaves" and "serfs", such as jušen halangga niyalma "a serf of the Manchus" (literally, "a person of the Jušen clan"). The standard English version of the name, "Jurchen," is an Anglicized transliteration of the Mongolian equivalent of the Jurchen term jušen (Mongolian: Jürchen, plural form Jürched), and may have made it to the West via Mongolian texts. A less common English transliteration is "Jurched".

Chiefdom of Mongol tribes
The qualifier Mongol Tribes was established as an umbrella term in the early 13th century, when Temüjin (later Genghis Khan) united the different tribes into the Mongol Nation, the precursor of the Mongol Empire. There were 19 Nirun tribes that descended from Bodonchar and 18 Darligin tribes, which were also core Mongolic tribes but not descending from Bodonchar. Besides the original Mongols, many of those clans and tribes were of Turkic, and some of Tungusic or other origin.

The forming of kinship between Manchus and Mongols
Intermarriage with Mongolian noble families further cemented the alliance between the two peoples. In 1612 Nurhachi himself married the daughter of the chief of the Khorcin Mongols(科尔沁旗). From 1612 to 1615 Nurhachi and his sons together married six Mongolian women. After 1617 other Manchus married into the Mongolian nobility, and surrendering Mongol tribes enrolled in Manchu banners provided significant numbers of women to marry the Manchu elite. Hong Taiji expanded the marriage alliance policy, marrying twelve of his daughters to Mongolian chieftains. He used marriage ties to draw in more of the twenty-one southern Mongolian tribes that joined the Manchu alliance. The Manchu-Mongolian alliance became even more systematized and regulated after the Qing conquested the rest of China. Special annual subsides of silver and silk, elabolate funerals, and the granting of high rank to sons all encouraged intermarriage....The Qianlongand Jiaqing emperors expanded the system to encompass thousands of marriages between all levels of the Manchu and Mongolian nobel classes. At the same time, commoners of both sides were kept rigidly segregated, and intermarriage was banned. This highly regulated, large-scale kinship creation program differed substantially from previous dynasties' uses of occasional marriage alliances to ensure peace with northwestern frontier peoples, the so-called heqin(Chinese:和親) policy, which went back to the Han dynasty.Page 125

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The difference between a chiefdom and a state?
This should be more explained in the article--MiguelMadeira (talk) 13:06, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Merge with 'Tribal chief'?
There seems to be a lot of overlap between these two pages. Alexanderkowal (talk) 12:46, 24 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Tribal chief Alexanderkowal (talk) 12:46, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Alexanderkowal (talk) 01:48, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not very active on Wikipedia these days but thanks for the tag. I would oppose merging them since chiefdom is an important and influential concept in the Sahlins and Service classifications used heavily in late 20th century anthropology and sometimes still today, as per @Alexanderkowal's comments below, and would be distinct from a tribal chief in the context of anthropological jargon. TriNotch (talk) TriNotch (talk) 17:40, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Alexanderkowal (talk) 01:51, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Chiefdom is a form of society or government between stateless and state society, but not the only one and not synomymous with either. The chief is the institution that can make it into a state, a monarchy to be exact, and in this case a chief can be understood as one of the basic forms of a monarch. So if at all tribal chief could be integrated into monarch or into this article here.
 * But then again I am also very much against characterizing chiefdoms as monarchies since chiefs can be just representatives of non-stratified grassroot forms of government, which then again also do not need to be understood as stateless political organization.
 * That said I am generally against reducing complexity and merging everything in ever more broader concepts, and even tribal chief can remain an independent article describing this particular and most basic form of monarch (ech possibly refering to each others articles).
 * So no I am not for merger! I am rather for introducing a better frame, for chiefdom by describing it as a form of government between stateless and state and tribal chief through not-/monarch. Ill find a ref now and when I find a suitable Ill add the point on stateless and state organization. Nsae Comp (talk) 22:17, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Done the edit on the lead & corrected my first reply (sorry I seem to have pasted two versions of my reply into each other) Nsae Comp (talk) 23:31, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
 * That looks good, I’ll remove the merge, not entirely sure why I did it in the first place tbh Alexanderkowal (talk) 08:33, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for replying, yeah, they probably shouldn’t be merged. Good point regarding the framing, perhaps just expanding the first paragraph will be a good improvement, the article itself has a lot of good content. I recommend looking at Elman Service’s classifications if you are gonna do this. Alexanderkowal (talk) 22:23, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
 * @Nsae Comp ^^ Alexanderkowal (talk) 22:26, 26 February 2024 (UTC)