Stateless Societies Research Articles

Locating the State: Between Region and History

If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations.

Deconstructing The Conundrum in the Historiography of Acephalous Societies in Nigeria 1900-1990

An ambivalent appellation, acephalousness or non-centrality led to misinterpretations of the political systems and structures of Nigerian societies that obviously were not as professionalized as those in the erstwhile Empires and Emirates. Yet, the acephalous societies had political structures as much as the centralized ones. From the times of David Hume, Friedrich Hegel through to Hugh-Trevor Roper, African history faced distortions; and presented as unworthy of any kind of academic study. This was, unarguably, a crop-up from a Eurocentric misperception and misconception whereof Africa became labelled the “Dark Continent: waiting to be discovered by Europeans. Seemingly a justification of the colonization of Africa, African historians, nonetheless, became challenged to the best approaches in writing her history. Another challenge was the misconception that documentation or written history was the only acceptable history. Arab/Muslim scholars effectively covered the socio-political and economic activities in the centralized societies where they found employment as scribes or chroniclers. This study, first, attempted grasping at the contents, perspectives and methodology of African history; second, it examined the challenges inherent in the study of acephalous or stateless societies and, third, provided ample ways of addressing the challenges. The findings revealed that beyond written documents, oral traditions and the application of the interdisciplinary research approach were integral and indispensable parts in the historiography of African societies, especially of the acephalous. Using the primary and secondary sources, the study concluded that in spite of the limitations of oral traditions, they remained indispensable in interrogating the history of acephalous societies.

Krytyka funkcji wyborów w państwach demokratycznych na przykładzie dyskursu we współczesnym polskim ruchu anarchistycznym i jego intelektualnych inspiracji

Parliamentary democracy is a political system based on elections, which are held periodically and have specific functions. The most important of these are: the power-building function, the legitimising function and the representative function. However, there are social movements that negate these functions. One of them is the anarchist movement. Anarchists believe that parliamentary democracy and the state limit the freedom of human beings and social groups. That is why they are opposed to general elections. In their opinion, parliamentary democracy should be replaced by stateless societies based on direct and participatory democracy.

Of Stag Hunts and secret societies: Cooperation, male coalitions and the origins of multiplicity

In many circumstances where multiple, autonomous actors exist, cooperation is only a viable strategy if other actors also pursue a strategy of cooperation. Such situations can be characterised in terms of the Stag Hunt, based on a parable told by Rousseau. Although traditionally interpreted as a device for understanding how mutually beneficial cooperation can emerge, Harrison Wagner points out that would-be exploiters must overcome similar problems to succeed at subjugating others. Successful cooperation may have the ironic consequence of enabling deeper conflict within and between a multiplicity of societies. Despite its canonical status, the importance of the Stag Hunt for understanding the interaction between multiple societies may have been underestimated. Nonetheless, rational choice theory alone cannot explain how cooperation-for-predation became established, while historical sociology’s conventional ‘materialist metanarrative’ of the origin of war and the state may have unduly neglected the role of gender relations. The phenomenon of men’s secret societies, found in many stateless societies, indicates that fraternal solidarity within coalitions of men competing to control women’s labour and bodies may provide a path to the nucleation of warlike states. If this is correct, it becomes clear that in many societies, men and women experience multiplicity in qualitatively different ways.

Making and unmaking the state in the Horn of Africa: A deep-time perspective

In this article, I intend to use archaeology’s understanding of deep time and infrastructure to explore the ways in which state-making has been challenged in the Horn of Africa during the last two millennia. I will take a long-term approach to state ecology and state resistance so as to eschew the presentist bias that is all too frequent in political analyses, particularly in Africa, and that prevents us from understanding some of the deep undercurrent that explain contemporary phenomena. The Horn is an ideal case for this kind of inquiry because it has some of the oldest state polities south of the Sahara; state trajectories in the region are non-linear and fraught with obstacles, though surprisingly persistent, and small-scale, stateless societies have proved to be extremely persistent, both in the periphery and at the heart of the state. Here I will explore three themes that are illustrative of the relationship between state-building, infrastructures and resistance in the borderlands of the Horn of Africa: the anti-infrastructural ethos of nomadic pastoralists; internal frontiers or zones of difference, and liminal ecologies, such as swamps and escarpments, which defy state control, technologies and imaginaries.

Communities Beyond Society: Divergence of Local Prehistories on the Bothnian Arc, Northern Europe

Abstract This article presents a comparison of material records of two nearby regions on the coast of the Bothnian Bay. The timeframe is 5300–2000 BCE. The focus is on regional differences, which indicate a schizmogenesis of communal identities. The study calls for a reorientation of research concerning Fennoscandian prehistory. More attention should be paid to localized prehistories. It is argued that when prehistoric society is used as a fundamental group category, especially in the context of forager communities, the modern concept of state society distorts the underlying framework. Focusing on the regional level by constructing local prehistoric narratives limits the anachronistic effect and allows the proliferation of local communal identities. Such local prehistories, when collated and compared, offer a pathway to understanding prehistoric stateless societies, which are misrepresented by simplistic material cultural zones and the inherent homogeny ingrained within the concept of society. In this paper, the analysis is focused on practices representing local traditions. Two divergent themes that arise from the local prehistoric narratives are the Late Mesolithic use of local stone materials and regional changes in Neolithic dwelling forms.

Law in stateless societies: scapegoats, curses and punishers in Greek literature

ABSTRACT Rene Girard, influential theorist of sacrifice and victimage, casts Oedipus as a scapegoat, who absorbs the ‘free-floating’ guilt that has plagued Thebes. But is he? Girard’s definitions of the scapegoat and reciprocal violence are established, and then differentiated from the administration of punishment in the stateless societies of ancient Greek myths, using the laws of Zeus and the story cycle of the Oresteia. Practices and attitudes surrounding man-boy sexual and pederastic relationships are reconstructed as they evolved from mythic into historic times in Greece. The larger story of Laius, Pelops, Chrysippus, Oedipus and Jocasta is investigated using scholarship on lost but attested plays as well as mythographic materials. By establishing Laius’s illicit abduction of Chrysippus as the source of guilt, and its treatment in tragedy in historic Athens, Oedipus emerges instead as an unwitting and unwilling agent of punishment in a stateless but not lawless society.

Households production in State and stateless societies: three tales and one letter

Interpreting three tales based on the words of Hume, Hobbes, and Nozick, and a letter by Vilfredo Pareto, we present a comparative analysis of household production in several societies with and without State. The community we analyse is formed by two households, which may either follow a selfish or an altruistic logic. Furthermore, unless the stateless community has a common defence against external marauders or implements protection in cases of bad weather, the household production can be stolen or damaged. The society with State is ruled by a Government that can be either partisan or bipartisan. The economic analysis of the private and public choice of this community allows us to compare the efficiency and inequality of several configurations of society, as depicted by classical political economy.

Being realistic and demanding the impossible

Characterising realism by contrasting it with moralism leaves open several questions to do with realism’s practical import. If political judgment is not to be derived — exclusively or at all — from pre-political moral commitments, what scope is there for genuinely normative political thinking? And even if there is some scope for political normativity, does realism’s reliance on interpretations of political practices condemn it to some form of status quo bias? In this paper I address those questions. My main aim is to assuage some worries about realism’s alleged conservative tendencies. I argue that there is an important sense in which realists can support radical and even unachievable political change — one can be realistic and demand the impossible, as the soixante- huitard slogan goes. To see how that may be the case one needs to characterise realism by contrasting it with both non-ideal theory and utopianism. In a nutshell, realism differs from non- ideal theory because it need not be concerned with feasibility constraints, and it differs from utopianism because it eschews detailed blueprints of the perfect polity.

Organizational Structures, Institutions and Administrative Systems in Pre-Colonial African States: A Discourse

Contrary to some scholars’ views, pre-colonial African societies did not lack political organization. African societies developed diverse political systems based on local needs and realities before the advent of the Europeans. Like the ‘centralized’ states, the ‘acephalous’ societies, that is, stateless societies, also evolved a decentralized government based on kinship and lineage system. There has been timeless controversy over the nature of government in what has been variously referred to as the ‘decentralized’ or ‘segmentary polities; the argument here however, is that since human societies have been seen as evolving from hunting and gathering bands to more units like the state, and since they have embodied in their very networks the seeds of strains and conflicts, societies differ in the way they try to tackle problems emanating from interactions; and therefore, the maintenance of social equilibrium, cohesions, and the all-important question of peace. This paper argues that if the purpose of government is the promotion of the welfare of the populace, then the pre- colonial African societies had all the attributes of government; the interactive dynamic process of which a balance between power and authority was ensured on the one hand, and service and accountability on the other.

Book Review of The Evolution of Human Co-operation: Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies, by Charles Stanish

Book Review of The Evolution of Human Co-operation: Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies, by Charles Stanish

Dualism and entanglement in anthropological approaches to statehood

Within the discipline of anthropology, the tension between persisting quests for ‘difference’ and historically holistic approaches to interdependence is most evident in current debates on statehood. In various ways, these debates engage with and expand political anthropology’s old concern with the articulation between different forms of politics and social organization. A latent reference point for these debates is the concept of the state as a development away from kin-based, egalitarian societies and towards rational and functional forms of rule. In this article, I examine how the diverse dualisms associated with this view travel across different scholarly settings and are used to articulate various academic and political agendas. This is illustrated by convergence between recent anthropological imaginings of ‘stateless societies’ and the explanations for political order in areas of ‘limited statehood’ sought in international relations. Nevertheless, these notions have been challenged by studies of processes within globally interrelated social histories, structured contingency and the concurrence of diverse logics of action, pointing to the entanglement of kinship, territoriality and other modes of social organization. More significantly still, these approaches provide an alternative way of theorizing dualisms, showing that the difference and autonomy they attribute to particular realms are not given, but produced through relational processes.

Eurasian Steppe Chariots and Social Complexity During the Bronze Age

This paper aims to examine some societal principles that underlie the development of horse-drawn chariots in Inner Eurasia during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (cal. 2050–1750 BC). Analysis is based on an evaluation and re-examination of the archaeological evidence for horse-drawn chariots, and the social constructs they entail. Chariots were developed in the zone of the Northern Eurasian steppes before c. 2000 BC in the context of complex but stateless societies. Because chariots depend on a set of developed skills, valuable resources, and complicated technologies, which involve several outstanding improvements to previously known solutions, they require specific conditions for their development and maintenance in social life. Most fundamentally, they require a group of people with an interest in this complex technology: a class of military elites characterized by aggrandizing behavior. The competition between collectives of military elites for resources, power and prestige brought into life the earliest chariot complex in the world.

Giacomo Macola. The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics.

With The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics, Giacomo Macola has made a major contribution to the history of Africa, and a small one to the history of technology. The book begins by criticizing the histories of guns in Africa written in the 1970s and 1980s for concentrating exclusively on the functional uses of guns for hunting and warfare. The social construction of technology that followed in the 1990s, which stressed the role of users in determining the function of guns, represented a partial advance. In this book, Macola claims to offer a further advance by presenting what he calls the “domestication” perspective (6), in which African guns are embedded in social relations and in personal identities and statuses, as well as in functional uses. The heart of his book, and by far the most significant contribution, is Macola’s description and analysis of the many diverse ethnic groups, from traditional kingdoms to small-scale stateless societies, that occupied south-central Africa—the region between the Great Lakes to the east, Angola to the west, the Congo to the north, and South Africa to the south—in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this savanna region where there were no clear borders, widely scattered populations moved in search of pastures for their cattle, elephants for ivory, and slaves.

The Social Provision of Punishment and Incarceration

AbstractStandard economic theory proposes that public goods (equally available to everyone) will be underprovided by private markets. Individuals can benefit without having to pay, so there is little incentive to invest or manage resources efficiently. The punishment of criminals is an example of this, since everyone in a society benefits from reduced crime whether they pay to apprehend criminals or not. On that basis, it is widely presumed that governments must provide criminal justice services, including prisons. But the evidence in favor of that view is ambiguous. Stateless societies throughout history have found ways to maintain public order without ever building a prison. Nations with adequate social safety nets and a high degree of equality are also likely to rely on alternatives to incarceration. Strong forms of public goods theory, when applied to punishments and prisons, are shown to be false, since crime control does exist without a centralized state. Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that centralized government provision and management can also suffer inefficiencies from overproduction. Only comparative institutional analysis can speak to the efficiency potentials of punishment, wherein the costs of underproduction are assessed against the likely consequences of overproduction.

Key figure of mobility: the nomad

This article discusses the relationship between nomadic people and the figure of the nomad in a European context. Based on a discussion of the presence of the figure of the nomad in European folk imaginary and in the social sciences, from Pierre Clastres's (1977. Society against the state. New York: Urizen) work on stateless societies, to Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of Nomadology (1986. Nomadology. New York: Semiotex(e)) and Braidotti's (1994. Nomadic subjects. Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press) nomadic feminism, the article employs a ‘nomadic’ perspective on ethnographic work of mobile people. It argues that ideas contrasting the nomadic and the state can be put to use for epistemological purposes.

Preventing chiefs from being chiefs: An ethnography of a co-operative sheet-metal factory

Knowledge of how democracy and equality are practically achieved within member-based organisations such as co-operatives remains underdeveloped in the literature. In order to investigate this question, this study is based on a piece of ethnographic work, namely, 1 year of participant observation as a factory worker, which I conducted within a French co-operative sheet-metal factory. Pondering the presence within the co-operative of seemingly powerless chiefs, I draw on the works of French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1934–1977) on stateless societies in order to study co-operators in their ‘continual effort to prevent chiefs from being chiefs’. Three types of day-to-day practices appear to be central for members of the co-operative in circumventing the coalescence of power in the hands of their chiefs: a relentlessly voiced refusal of the divide between chiefs and lay members; a permanent requirement for accountability and endless overt critique towards chiefs; and the use of schoolboy humour. The case, as analysed through a Clastrian lens, evidences a novel avenue that is conducive to avoiding the fate of oligarchisation within democratic organisations. Indeed, it shows how power can be kept at bay by being named and then embodied in a figure, who is eventually – through mostly informal practices – stripped of all authority. In addition, it suggests that our understanding of co-operation could be greatly improved if researchers’ dominant focus on governance was complemented by studies anchored in the everyday experience of co-operators.

Political order and inequality: their foundations and their consequences for human welfare

The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a political authority enforcing it? Or do we need a state to live together? This problem then opens up two further questions. If a state is necessary to establish order, how does it come into place? And, when it does, what are the consequences for the political status and economic welfare of its citizens? Combining ethnographical material, historical cases, and statistical analysis, this book describes the foundations of stateless societies, why and how states emerge, and the basis of political obligation. As a result of this inquiry, it explains the economic and political roots of inequality, describes the causes of the stagnation of the preindustrial world, and explores what led to the West's prosperity of the past two centuries.

Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies

Abstract This article argues the following points. The Hobbesian hypothesis, which we define as the claim that all people are better off under state authority than they would be outside of it, is an empirical claim about all stateless societies. It is an essential premise in most contractarian justifications of government sovereignty. Many small- scale societies are stateless. Anthropological evidence from them provides sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the hypothesis, if not to reject it entirely. Therefore, contractarian theory has not done what it claims to do: it has not justified state sovereignty to each person subject to it by demonstrating that they benefit from that authority. To be justified in contractarian terms, states have to do something to improve the living standards of disadvantaged people under their rule.

In and out of the state: Working the boundaries of power in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Anthropology has often renewed itself by studying collective self-organization beyond the reach of the state. The idea that power usually flows top-down from a state monopoly is increasingly questioned in an era of networks fuelled by interactive decision-making processes that include non-state actors. Power theoretically understood as potentia – the elementary power through which human beings deploy their productive capacities and creative possibilities – is ontologically prior to power expressed as an obsession with order that is often repressive ( potestas). Granting precedence to potentia over potestas inevitably leads us to question the conceptual centrality of the state. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has long stood – and stands today – as a symbol of the antithesis of social order, offers much material for reflection on this issue. While this paper considers how people negotiate the boundaries between state and non-state power in the contemporary DRC, its lasting contribution is to revive in a distinctly new way a tradition of anthropology to use the study of stateless societies to pose big critical questions about the institutions on which modern societies rest.