Kinship and Polity in the Poema de Mio Cid

Chapter Four: Polity

Chapter Four Polity Previous chapters have dealt with various aspects of communal solidarity: kinship, amity, marriage. The present chapter is largely concerned with authority. In light of the multitude of possible definitions of the latter term, we will limit discussion to those meanings that reveal some degree of analogy to the poem's concepts of government and social order. We may therefore adopt a notion of authority as legitimated power, as a recognition ofthe right to control or influence accorded by the governed, through enactment of law, decree, or by collective resolution. Authority, furthermore, is inevitably linked with a notion of power. The latter term is usefully applied to the PMC in Max Weber's sense, that of an ability to achieve one's desires in social context, even against the resistance of others. Power may be enforced through domination, as when law is "upheld by a specific staff of men who will use physical or psychical compulsion." Power may also be implemented through more distributed means, as through political influence, legislative statute, or bureaucratic POlicy.1 Authority may therefore be further defined as "the capacity to exact compliance or to induce behavior." But this definition could equally be applied to straightforwardly aggressive means of exacting obedience. Conformity as a response to mere belligerence cannot serve as an associative or cooperative principle of polity. The latter phenomenon can be defined, for the purposes of this essay, as a system of organizing allegiances above the level of amity, which, we recall, involves interpersonal relationships. If kinship thinking is extrapolated far enough beyond the domain of small-scale, kin-based relationships , it loses its metaphorical value, transmuting into something quite different. The purpose ofkinship ideology is solidarity. 151 Chapter Four Amity, the philosophical essence of kinship thinking, is designed to hold the community together. Authority, we may hazard , is designed to mobilize communal activity. Amity leads; authority manages. Polity, in the formulation of Talcott Parsons, is "concerned with the selection, ordering and attainment of collective goals, rather than the maintenance of solidarity (including order) as such" (25). Polity, then, is a level of organization that collectively mediates, codifies, surrogates, and stratifies. Imposing a vision of the big picture, it makes indirect that which had been direct. Supplanting amity with charity, it shifts the focus of altruism from the individual level to that of the group. It seeks compromise where the kin-ordered world prefers conflict; it keeps the peace, where the rule of amity demands satisfaction. Polity is about both control and corruption: it seduces as often as it compels, by its promise of security and order. In fact, the less coercive force is required, the more authoritarian the polity. Anthony Giddens presents a synthesis of views on polity and its relationship to power, according to which the latter term refers both to the efficacy of the social actor's will in attaining its goals (the Weberian concept) and to a "property of the collectivity ." Neither concept, argues Giddens, "is appropriate in isolation." Social structure, he contends, can be understood in terms of the "mediations and transformations" it makes possible in the "temporal-spatial constitutions of social systems ." The efficacy of mediation-its ability to "bind" the arrangement of social space-time-may be determined by reference to what Giddens calls the "presence-availability" of actors. Where interaction is primarily of a face-to-face kind, mediation is facilitated by physical contiguity. When geography or demography prohibit amicable solutions, the group is organized by more diffuse, indirect means (Central Problems in Social Theory 69, 103). It is the purpose of this chapter to refute, to a certain extent, the long-standing notion, prevalent since Hinojosa, that the PMC exhibits a highly authoritarian society, with Alfonso and the Cid each as caudillo in his respective sphere. Thomas R. Hart and Roger M. Walker, each from a different perspective, support this view, arguing for a hierarchical reading of authority relations in the poem. The latter critic even goes so far as to 152 Polity contend that after the reconciliation between the Cidand Alfonso, "the Cid's active role ... is more or less over," while "the King's is just beginning." The vistas "confirm the Cid's vindication as a true vassal," while their later meeting functions "to confirm Alfonso's vindication as a true lord." The Cid uses the vistas, Walker points out, to dramatize his vassalage to the maximum, and to...