TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

2.1.3. Bureaucracy vs. Face-to-face Relations
One of the most prominent institutes that differentiates states from tribal organization is
bureaucracy. A tribal chief does not need a specialized class of scripts in order to
regulate and govern the issues of his tribe. The government of tribe works mainly on
oral and kinship basis. Barth gives one striking example from the Basseri Tribe. As he
writes in his ethnological study on this tribe, which became one of the classics in the
field, “communications from the chief are relied on word of mouth via messengers – a
service to which any Basseri may be deputed.” 128 The function of professional script
class however, ıs not confined into merely its organizational support, which makes it
possible to govern vast areas and huge populations. It totally changes the nature of
relations in public sphere and of the functioning state apparatus. Instead of the person of
the chief, obedience is owed to the legally established impersonal order in a
bureaucratized governmental system. Bureaucracy shifts relations from a personal to
impersonal basis. In a tribe, not only the daily commitments of sub-tribal groups but also
the very vital issues relating to the internal and external affairs of the whole tribe, such
as the distribution of pasturelands, the decision on raiding when and where etc., are
managed via personal relations and ties such as kinship, comradeship, and slavery.
Incorporation of bureaucracy by a professional trained script class curbs, however, the
influence of personal ties and augments the role of legal norms, abstract rules, and the
law, which are by definition impersonal 129 .
128 Barth, p. 76.
129 Max Weber, The Theory of Social end Economic Organization, trs., A. M. Henderson and Talcott
Parsons, edited with an introduction by Talcott Parsons, New York, London: The Free Press, 1964, pp.
329-330.
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