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

Furthermore, the office, an impersonal source of obedience, emerges via abstract
rules and laws. In such a system the person occupying an office could not exercise any
power stemming from himself, but he exercises the power of his office. The web of
offices and the rules regulating these offices requires, of course, a certain technical
training and education, which creates, as a result, a specialized group. This bureaucratic
administrative staff, though nominally being dependent to the ruler, to the sultan in the
Ottoman case for example, de facto masters the functioning of the governmental
apparatus. Among them what gains prominence is, as Max Weber has put,
…the dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality, ‘Sine ira et studio’,
without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm. The
dominant norms are concepts of straightforward duty without regard to personal
considerations. Everyone is subject to formal equality of treatment; that is,
everyone in the same empirical situation. 130
What create fundamental differences between tribal administration and
bureaucratic state administration, at the micro level, are, perhaps, the written documents.
It is clear that the adoption of written modes of communication was intrinsic to the
development of more wide-ranging, more depersonalized, and more abstract systems of
government; at the same time, the shift from oral intercourse meant assigning less
importance to face-to-face situations. 131 In a tribal organization, which barely uses
documents, the media through which orders are transmitted is aural, which is, by
definition subjective, personal, and humanlike. One does not need any special training or
education in order to use aural media. Another important feature of this media, which
also has significant influence on the nature of tribal organization, pertains to its
durability. The life of sound finishes as soon as it appears. What lasts after a sound’s
130 Weber, p. 340.
131 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990
(first published 1977), p. 16.
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