The Magic of the Nation‑State in Malaysia

Abstract

There are nation-states, and then there is the kind of polity that anthropologists have long discovered, nations without a state. When Tribes Without Rulers (Middleton and Tait 1958) was published almost fifty years ago, the collection of essays was considered as anthropology's major contribution to the classic issue in European political philosophy: the dilemma of societal peace and the coercive mechanism necessary for its maintenance. As with other works dealing with law and judicial processes in tribal societies, what engage these essays are questions about the diverse ways in which tribal societies are able to function, arbitrate, and resolve conflict without something that might resemble the state structure. Instead, judicial and executive functions are carried by kinship, lineage organization, and other cultural institutions. The state functions, in other words, thus rely essentially on culture, drawing as they do on a considerable force of social sharing of ties of values and emotions among people often distributed over a large territory. In the modern nation-state, of course, these state functions are relatively more ration-