Stateless Societies Research Articles

Cherry Leonardi. Dealing With Government in South Sudan: Histories of Chiefship, Community and State. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: James Currey, 2013. xvi + 253 pp. Map. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $80.00, £45.00. Cloth.

Cherry Leonardi. Dealing With Government in South Sudan: Histories of Chiefship, Community and State. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: James Currey, 2013. xvi + 253 pp. Map. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $80.00, I45.00. Cloth.Recent journalistic accounts of conflicts in the new state of South Sudan have tended to interpret them as between the age-old antagonistic of the Dinka and the Nuer. An earlier and influential generation of anthropologists and Africanists (notably E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt) described the southern Sudanese region as one of leaderless stateless societies. More recent historians' accounts have seen tribes and chiefs as inventions of colonial rule, with imagined myths of identity and creation. Many have argued that local chiefs have existed at least since the colonial era-but were they in reality the representatives of local groups or of the central government? Accounts of the southern Sudanese independence movements have described the changing relationships between the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLM/A) and those who were seen, or saw themselves, as local chiefs. The complex and contradictory nature of political power in southern Sudan exemplifies and perhaps even exceeds that of the rest of Africa. Anyone seeking to understand this complexity, rather than applying any of these old cliches, will now have to start with Leonardi's important and sophisticated book.It is perhaps not an easy read for those who know nothing of earlier literature on the region, and journalists or students with little knowledge of South Sudan might do better to start with more straightforward works such as Douglas Johnson's The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars (James Currey, 2012). But Leonardi's book will for a long time be central to any deeper understanding of political structures in the newest African country. She traces the twentieth-century history of political leadership in the region in a comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically detailed manner that has not been attempted before by the many historians and anthropologists who have written about South Sudan.The work is based on three urban centers-Juba, Yei, and Rumbek- which were at the heart of post-1900 regional political developments such as military slavery, colonialism, and nationalism. The author's qualitative research in the area and archival knowledge provide a detailed account of how state-or statelike-structures were created on the ground in a remarkably unwelcoming environment. …

Antropologi Hukum

In describing the development of legal anthropology as a new subdiscipline in anthropology, the author firstly clarifies the differences between legal anthropology and the common law science. Although the description of law had been found in ethnographic literatures since two centuries ago, a particular analysis on law emerged in 1920s as the result of debates between Malinowski and R. Brown on the mechanism of social control in stateless societies. Problems of whether law exists in the state or stateless societies stimulated the anthropologists to define the boundaries and scopes of "law", such as L. Pospisil's definition.  The development of studies, analysis, and interpretation on law systems in various societies lead to the emergence of legal anthropology as a subdiscipline in anthropology. 

Aspects of Mossi History: A Bibliography

This bibliography provides the basis for a research survey on the political, ideological, economic, and cultural aspects of the Mossi states. As such, it focuses on historical writings pertaining to the "precolonial" history of the Mossi states, particularly those of Ouagadougou, Tenkodogo and Yatenga, as well as their satellite states. I have included a number of references that pertain to the history of Mamprusi, Dagomba states, and the so-called "stateless societies ," in so far as they inform an understanding of historical processes that marked the institutional development of the Mossi states. The first section covers text publications on Mossi history, social organization and society, the second is on arts and literature, the third on Moore language and linguistics, and the fourth is a short list of important sound and video recordings.

Political organization in Nigeria since the late Stone Age: a history of the Igbo people

Introduction Igboland Before and During the Iron Age: From Stateless Societies to Mini States The Igbo and their Neighbors Before the 15th Century The Igbo and the Benin, Igala and Eastern Ijo Mega States during Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade The Aro Trade Network: Changes in Igbo Society from the 18th -19th Centuries Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Genesis of Legitimate Commerce, Christianity and the New Imperialism Developments in Igboland from the 1890s 1970s Conclusion

Chaos and order in stateless societies: Intercommunity exchange as a factor impacting the population dynamical patterns

The once abstract notions of dynamical chaos now appear naturally in various systems [Kaplan D, Glass L. Understanding nonlinear dynamics. New York: Springer; 1995]. As a result, future trajectories of the systems may be difficult to predict. In this paper, we demonstrate the appearance of chaotic dynamics in model human communities, which consist of producers of agricultural product and producers of agricultural equipment. In the case of a solitary community, the horizon of predictability of the human population dynamics is shown to be dependent on both intrinsic instability of the dynamics and the chaotic attractor sizes. Since a separate community is usually a part of a larger commonality, we study the dynamics of social systems consisting of two interacting communities. We show that intercommunity barter can lead to stabilization of the dynamics in one of the communities, which implies persistence of stable equilibrium under changes of the maximum value of the human population growth rate. However, in the neighboring community, the equilibrium turns into a stable limit cycle as the maximum value of the human population growth rate increases. Following an increase in the maximum value of the human population growth rate leads to period-doubling bifurcations resulting in chaotic dynamics. The horizon of predictability of the chaotic oscillations is found to be limited by 5 years. We demonstrate that the intercommunity interaction can lead to the appearance of long-period harmonics in the chaotic time series. The period of the harmonics is of order 100 and 1000 years. Hence the long-period changes in the population size may be considered as an intrinsic feature of the human population dynamics.

Are Africans Religious People or Fetish Inhabitants? Do They Have a Unifying Religion and Culture? Towards a Pedagogical Response!

My response as to whether African culture, religion is unifying or fetish takes bearing from the scholarly alarm raised by the Ugandan Poet, Okot, P'Bitek. Without any form of misunderstanding, the missionaries motive to evangelize African as alarmed by Okot, P'Bitek, and against the hubris of trimming African wisdom to fit Western missionary prejudices e.g. the “myth of the primitive” brings the scope of my review to the spotlight in this ongoing reflection. Some years ago I was asked to make a critic on this particular subject. I was even persuaded without any clue as to why I should do a critic on a subject that raises great controversy. In the first place, I was wondering why I should make such criticism giving the fact that these are issues that spin heads and leads scholars to head into opposite intersections in opinions. A scholarly judgment and assumptions on African faith, cosmos and culture was what was at stake. However, I was hesitant in the first place to bare my mind. In the other hand, I was interested in knowing why I should bare my mind on these controversial issues. Secondly, I wanted to know so that any criticism I would put forward would not sound as a lame argument from the wayside. More still, I wanted to know what inspired his curiosity to ask me to write a critic or compile a storehouse of what I believed to be acceptable beliefs of a people. I wanted to know whether his curiosity was astonishingly provoked by the willingness to question people's assumptions, people's acceptable beliefs system and people's way of life. His persuasion made a defining and compelling impression, but in an unintelligible manner. Using Socratic Method, he tried to win my confidence. Already, I had prepared my mind not to win his admiration in return. Again, my countenance did not show that I prepared even eager to engage in an impromptu rationalization. My indifference to his demand caused him to peg off as sullen type who would give up at first refusal. When he saw I was not positive to do a critic, he glided away as one attempting a disappearing act. The manner in which he glided away was filled with sudden mixture of anger and sadness. It made me knew that he was one of those optimists who had never received a “No” from an answer. The fact that the issues under review has been debated in many different quarters or written in a very lucid parlance jarred my mind of how other people and other culture view African society in general. With the spin of time, and after persistent request, I took up the task with bold courage and enthusiasm without minding any spill over or dialogical reaction. Scholarly alarm that African wisdom and thoughts are primitive is not only unfounded but illogical. Africa was not the only continent that has received callous remark in the past or in the present. Jerusalem that city of the living God was equally castigated as a city where “nothing good would ever come.” The response under review does not in any way intend to create cultural or cosmological imperatives. It does not aim to add to classical tales of triumph of the sacred over fetish, modern over primitive, advance over stateless societies. Again, this narrative does not in any way intend to investigate whether something good ever came from Jerusalem or not, but it intends as it may seem to clarify some misinterpretation or if you may say, misrepresentations of African cultural outlook and cosmological values.

Repelling states: Evidence from upland Southeast Asia

Although many economists recognize the existence of stateless orders, economists such as Cowen, Sutter, and Holcombe question how viable stateless orders are in the long run. Research documenting the historical existence of stateless societies is much more developed than our understanding of whether societies can successfully remain free of states. This article analyzes historical and anthropological evidence from societies in Southeast Asia that have avoided states for thousands of years. The article provides an overview of some of their customary legal practices and then describes the mechanisms that they use to avoid, repel, and prevent would-be states. Such stateless societies have successfully repelled states using location, specific production methods, and cultural resistance to states. A better understanding of these mechanisms provides a potential explanation for how such societies remained free of states for long periods of time.

Emerging forms of power in two African borderlands a theoretical and empirical research outline

The transformation of statehood is a frequently debated topic in studies dealing with globalization. This is particularly true with regard to the African continent; here, the “building” of the nation‐state has been confronted, more than anywhere else, with a number of challenges. At times and in certain areas, state structures even collapsed, and thus transformed contemporary Africa into the symbol of state failure. In particular the peripheries and borderlands of many post‐colonial states in Africa contribute to the emergence of local stateless forms of power, which seem to suggest the end of the globalized statehood utopia. Are these new forms of political organization only a reaction to uncertainty caused by the weakness or even the absence of state structures? Will these orders be able to substitute the State in the long run? Or are global processes confronted with persisting local representations and practises of order and rule, indicating that stateless societies can resist the overwhelming power of the “Leviathan"? Can the longevity of local political models lead to the transformation of the state as the only and unique model of organised power? Or do they foreshadow a specific form of interlacement between non‐state actors and the state that will lead to heterarchical political settings in Africa and elsewhere? And finally: in which respect do borderland‐situations contribute to these processes?

Did ‘Kin-based Societies’ Exist? On the (De)Construction of an Anthropological Concept

Concept of a ‘kin-based society’ relies on the assumption that, in stateless societies, kinship served as a fundamental and sufficient principle of social and political organization. Developed within the evolutionary paradigm, this concept has acquired different forms during the discipline’s history, depending on the theoretical orientation of various anthropologists and their understanding of the notion of ‘kinship’. Speaking from significantly different theoretical positions, anthropologists ranging from Rivers to Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, to Evans-Pritchard, Fortes and Levi-Strauss, all maintained that kinship formed a basis of social organization, although they did not always agree on the definition of the concept and the type of kinship relations that had this special quality of integrating and organizing the whole of society.
 The debates were primarily about whether it was consanguinity or affinity that served as a fundamental factor of forming and reproducing social relations. As modern anthropology rejects the idea that kinship relations can form the basis for social, economic and political integration in any type of society, including those without the state, class or caste system, this article considers the assumptions underpinning the construction of the concept witch for long played such an important role in the discipline’s knowledge but later came to be seriously challenged.

Steering Clear of State Control The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2009. 464 pp. $35, £20. ISBN 9780300152289. Agrarian Studies.

Scott uses a close look at the 80 million people who live in stateless societies in Southeast Asia to consider how such societies persist.

Self-enforcing norms and efficient non-cooperative collective action in the provision of public goods

We show how norms can solve the distributional conflict inside a group in an anarchic environment and yield efficient coordination of collective action in a conflict with an external competitor. The equilibrium of the fully non-cooperative game with finite horizon has two interesting features. First, one of the players assumes a central role that resembles the role of the ‘big-man’ in some primitive stateless societies. Second, the group members’ contributions to collective output and the payments from the big-man to these members seemingly look like reciprocal behavior, even though they are driven by narrowly selfish preferences.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Kinship

In 1962, I joined the Harvard-Central Brazil Research Project directed by David Maybury-Lewis and the late Brazilian anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira. We were a group of graduate students from Brazil and the United States following in the footsteps of the German ethnographic autodidact Curt Nimuendaju (born Curt Unkel 1883-1945), the French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss (b.1908), and David Maybury- Lewis who had worked extensively with two central Brazilian indigenous groups, the Xerente and Xavante, in the late 1950s. The intended goal of the Central Brazil project was a cross-cultural comparison of a small number of indigenous societies known to speak languages belonging to the Ge linguistic family, including the Bororo which is classified as Macro-Ge. Because these groups spoke cognate languages, they were thought to share a baseline common culture. Analyses of how their social structures were perceived to work, as understood by the individual field researchers, culminated in a joint comparative volume, Dialectical Societies: The Ge and Bororo of Central Brazil (Maybury-Lewis 1979). Maybury-Lewis arranged seminars and periodic discussion groups at Harvard and elsewhere attempting to pull the group together, especially when our interpretations appeared to range far afield. Although at times frustrating, these meetings were useful and no doubt helped to hone our analytical skills. Arguments over the applicability to the Ge of such concepts as patriliny and matriliny, prescriptive marriage, and moiety organization- to mention but a few of the terms that had become problematic for us-helped stimulate a rethinking of the traditional literature on these topics. Little seemed to work out in the field the way it was supposed both from a study of the earlier literature on central Brazilian societies and from a close reading of the classic texts in social anthropology. Members of the Ge project, immersed in the study of kinship, for many years the subject of a popular course offered by Maybury-Lewis at Harvard, began rethinking the relevance of the kind of kinship discourse that had prevailed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Tracking how kinship was deployed involved a closer scrutiny of all the relationships as they existed between actual persons in daily transactions. If the classic models did not work out in the field as anticipated in the classroom or as predicted in the literature, it was not because the study of kinship had lost its importance, but rather because systems of kin classification among the Ge were discovered to range beyond the expected genealogical and affinal circles to include an array of persons who have been designated by ethnographers variously as formal friends, or adoptive, pseudo-, false, and surrogate kinship relations. The extension of the use of kinship terms to include unrelated persons as classificatory kin, discovered in such small-scale, stateless societies as those of the Ge, serves as a modus vivendi for the community to share its responsibilities. Those appointed to kinship roles assist their kin in a variety of ways, especially important in food getting and child-rearing activities. Kayapo (Me?bengokre) inhabitants of the three villages (Gorotire, Kubenkranken, and Porori) where I did fieldwork in 1962, 1963, and again briefly in 1966, divided into either kin (ombikwa) or non-kin (me?baitebm). Relationships to newly appointed ombikwa are established formally and prominently in public ceremonies in the village plaza. Persons, unrelated by either blood or marriage, but who are recognized in this manner as ombikwa, can be called upon to perform special services for their ritual kin in village-wide celebrations. These commitments and obligations are put into play at the great public ceremonies celebrating birth, the giving of special names, the initiation of boys, and the commemoration of death. At such critical moments in the Kayapo life-cycle, honorary ombikwa make gifts of food, names, or ritual positions and ornaments. …

On Classic Maya political economies

Lowland Maya political economies are cosmopolitical economies, with “authoritative resources”—knowledge (“symbolic capital”), especially astro-calendrical knowledge, and ostensible control of time—evolving as the basis for Classic wealth, power, and dynastic legitimacy. Within a system of rotating geopolitical capitals, elite economic activities of production, consumption, and distribution were directed toward control of luxury goods and ritual performances emphasizing privileged interactions with the cosmos and ancestors. Examples include a “ritual mode of production” focused in a palace economy, consumption manifest in lavish public rituals and feasting, and goods circulating through tribute and periodic markets. In the dispersed lowland Maya settlement system, this decentralized economy retained some features more characteristic of stateless societies.

The crisis of governance in New Subsistence States

In the sixty years since the establishment of the United Nations on 24th October 1945, societies across the world have endeavoured to reshape themselves in accordance with the model of the modern state. Whereas the institutions of the modern state have proved appropriate for societies with historical experience of the production and administration of large surpluses, the adoption of state institutions presents an ongoing challenge for many other societies. Only a minority of states operate free from foreign aid, and weak states composed of stateless societies with minimal surplus generation capacity continue to face particular difficulties as they seek to adapt to the modern state system. Like other New Subsistence States, East Timor possesses grass-roots administrative capacities grounded in its village social structures. Short of the skills and resources necessary to support its formal justice system, East Timor has the option to formally integrate elements of its traditional mediation and conflict resolution capacities into the structure of the state.

Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900

Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900. By Walter Hawthorne. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 2003. Pp. xvi, 259, illustrations. $24.95 paper. In Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, Walter Hawthorne examines the social and economic effects of the Atlantic trade system on the coastal communities of Guinea-Bissau, with special attention to the Balanta ethnic group. He begins with a macro analysis of the region and then turns to the Balanta communities in the last portion of the book. He draws on ethnographic and historical sources, administrators' and travelers' memoirs, Portuguese and Guinean archival sources, and oral testimony. It is one of the few English language historical studies of the precolonial history of Guinea-Bissau and the first historical study with a focus on the Balanta during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Hawthorne is particularly concerned with the role of or stateless societies in the Atlantic slave trade. He challenges Walter Rodney's thesis, which emphasized the role of centralized states as active participants in the raiding for and selling of slaves and the role of dominant social groups in organizing such activities. Hawthorne provides substantial evidence that decentralized and relatively unstratified societies, like the Balanta, were not simply victims of predatory states but were active participants themselves. Hawthorne demonstrates the ways in which small, decentralized communities successfully engaged in slave raiding and trading, to procure a steady supply of iron to fashion weapons to defend themselves and to make farm implements that could increase food production and sustain larger and more defensible communities. He provides a convincing argument that Balanta reliance on local intermediaries in the slave trade and the fear of early European traders to operate in Balanta areas accounts for the paucity of written records of Balanta involvement. Of particular interest is an oral narrative that Hawthorne recounts of a type of ant that lived in large colonies and attacked smaller groups, which were likened to the large Balanta community of Filim, which raided smaller and weaker neighbors for slaves and sold them into the Atlantic trade networks. The thrust of his argument is persuasive, but it could be strengthened through comparisons with existing literature, including my own work on Diola or Felupe involvement in the slave trade. Rodney specifically mentions the Diola as well as the Balanta as examples of communities that lacked slave-trading elites and were primarily victims of neighboring states. Such comparisons would have provided detailed materials on the social and religious consequences of decentralized societies' participation in the slave trade. Still, Hawthorne outlines a number of significant social and agricultural changes in Balanta societies. Increasing physical insecurity in scattered upland settlements, known as moranca, led Balanta to move into lowland areas and form larger settlements (tabancas) protected by mangrove swamps and thick forest areas. …

Ashurbanipal's headhunt: An anthropological perspective

The severed head is a topic that has always attracted popular attention. In Christian art, for example, it was an image of martyrdom and fearless resistance against suppression. In contrast, popular accounts of headhunting have been used to convey an image of the primitive for Western audiences since the nineteenth century (e.g. Panel 1992). In anthropology headhunting has long been discussed in terms of materialist and evolutionary models. Only recently attempts have been made to place the phenomenon of headhunting in a wider historical and regional context (Hoskins 1987; idem 1996b; George 1991). The headhunter has become a professional recruiter in the search for executives to fill high-level positions. However, most scholars would not look to urban societies when researching the topic of the practice of headhunting, namely the taking of a head. We still habitually perceive it as an expression of violence and primitive warfare that occurs in stateless societies. In opposition to that view, this article will focus on an urban society in which a headhunt was, in at least one case, carried out in a strict anthropological sense: that is the headhunt of Ashurbanipal, described in the annals as the overthrow of the Elamite king Te-Umman and portrayed on the reliefs at Nineveh.

Organizing Violence

In stateless societies, coercion is privately provided; violence is employed to engage in, and to defend against, predation. At best, violence results in mere redistribution; being destructive, it more often results in a loss of social welfare. When organized, however, violence can be socially productive; it can be employed to defend property rights, thereby strengthening the incentives to engage in productive activity. To explore how violence can be rendered a source of welfare, the authors develop a model of a stateless society in which people's rights to the product of their labor are secure only if they possess coercive capabilities. Using case materials and formal logic, the authors then compare this outcome with that obtained when private agents reward specialists in violence for defending property rights. In doing so, we plumb the role of the state.

Colonialism, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian State

This author suggests new avenues for thinking about the relationship between formerly stateless societies and the state. It does so through a detailed study of one particular group, the Shuar, indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon. Formerly an acephalous society of hunter-gardeners, the Shuar now constitute a federation with a democratically elected, hierarchical leadership and are at the forefront of indigenous movements in Latin America. The author analyzes this transformation in the context of colonialism but argues that colonialism involves far more than the movement of people from one place to another or the extension of state authority over new territory. Rather, he reveals colonialism to hinge on the transformation of sociospatial boundaries. Such transformations were critical not only to Shuar ethnogenesis but also to Ecuadorian state-building. That is, colonialism involves a dialectical reorganization both of the state and of its new subjects.

Revenge as Sanction and Solidarity Display: An Analysis of Vendettas in Nineteenth-Century Corsica

Discussions of violence observe that dispute resolution in stateless societies often involves vengeance and collective responsibility for harm. These patterns are typically attributed to a distinctive cultural world-view emphasizing collectivism. Collective hostility is also a common theme in studies of stateless domains within industrial societies, where it is seen as a social pathology. Yet vengeance can also be understood as a purposeful sanction against collective aggression, rather than as a culturally prescribed response to aggression in general. Court records from Corsica are used to assess the rate at which murder was avenged, the determinants of revenge, and patterns in the kin relationships involved. Vengeance was rare and typically occurred when the original incident involved collaboration or violence against nondisputants. Vengeance rarely extended beyond the nuclear family. When it did, correspondingly distant kin of the original victim acted as avengers. Moreover, selection of vengeance targets was based on specific acts of solidarity, not on abstract collective responsibility. Accordingly, acts of revenge were calibrated to demonstrate that the aggrieved family's cohesiveness equalled that displayed by the offender's group. Viewed in this way, vendettas are highly strategic yet altruistic acts—calling into question the conventional notion that rational action is selfish.

Revenge as Sanction and Solidarity Display: An Analysis of Vendettas in Nineteenth-Century Corsica

Discussions of violence observe that dispute resolution in stateless societies often involves vengeance and collective responsibility for harm. These patterns are typically attributed to a distinctive cultural world-view emphasizing collectivism. Collective hostility is also a common theme in studies of stateless domains within industrial societies, where it is seen as a social pathology. Yet vengeance can also be understood as a purposeful sanction against collective aggression, rather than as a culturally prescribed response to aggression in general. Court records from Corsica are used to assess the rate at which murder was avenged, the determinants of revenge, and patterns in the kin relationships involved. Vengeance was rare and typically occurred when the original incident involved collaboration or violence against nondisputants. Vengeance rarely extended beyond the nuclear family. When it did, correspondingly distant kin of the original victim acted as avengers. Moreover, selection of vengeance targets was based on specific acts of solidarity, not on abstract collective responsibility. Accordingly, acts of revenge were calibrated to demonstrate that the aggrieved family's cohesiveness equalled that displayed by the offender's group. Viewed in this way, vendettas are highly strategic yet altruistic acts-calling into question the conventional notion that rational action is selfish