INTRODUCTION
WE DISTINGUISH BROADLY between stateless and state societies. Every society, regarded as a political system as well as a unit relying on a particular technology, is a unique system of organizing access to sources of energyâland, water, labor, tools of production, seed and fertilizer, and the like. In a stateless society, access to resources and energy systems and their control are organized locally, without the intervention of centers of authority outside the community. An important feature of this access and control is the underlying premise that every member of the group has rights of access to available and exploitable resources. This in turn is based upon another premise of social life in stateless societies: most members of a group have essentially equal status in their relations with each other and with the habitat. In other words, stateless societies tend to be more or less egalitarian.
Egalitarianism as an adaptive principle is most clearly observable among nomadic hunter-gatherers. In these groups, every member of a camp has equal rights to hunt and gather within its territory; no person can gain control over others because there are no resources over which he can exercise exclusive rights. The ideological expression of this is that no one in a hunting-gathering group has special authority to tell anyone else what to do. This is not to say that such groups are without status systems; different individuals have different measures of prestige and influence over others and are more sought after as hunting or marriage partners by virtue of their ability and other personal attributes. But this prestige does not provide themâor anyoneâwith authority, with the legal or rightful power to command others to act in particular ways. The exceptions to this rule are specific and limited, as when an Eskimo organizes and leads a caribou hunt or (as described in Selection 5) when a Shoshonean Indian owns a net that others share during a rabbit hunt.
Among hunter-gatherer-fishermen who achieve a degree of sedentism, like the Northwest Coast fishermen (Selection 7), a pattern of âseriationâ emerges the touchstone of which is a more or less hereditary office of chieftainship that is often usually honorific, rudimentary, and almost devoid of authority. There are variations in this pattern even among Northwest Coast fishermen, depending largely on habitational factors, but no matter how precise social distinction may become, each status position in these egalitarian societies is occupied by only one person. In contrast, in the nation-state, any number of peopleâas many as millionsâmay occupy a single status, especially at the lower reaches of society. This development is explored in The Evolution of Political Society, by Morton H. Fried (New York: Random House, 1967).
These principles continue to apply in cultivating strategies of adaptation, though with important modifications or elaborations. Among cultivating societies organized along stateless lines, order and conformity, regularity in productive relationships, and the smooth flow of goods in the course of distribution and consumption are maintained by autonomous networks of people who are attached to each other by ties of kinship, by trade relationships (which may also be hereditary), by friendship, neighborliness, and the like. Rules are important in the organization of these networks and their relationships with each other, for example concerning marriage, feasting and other ceremonials, and feuding. Economic and political relationships are conducted through institutions that are locally based and in which positive and negative sanctions are applied directly in face-to-face interactions.
The most significant change in political organization seen among completely sedentary cultivators is in connection with the allocation of resources, especially land. Here control over land moves from the household to larger units, such as groups of households, lineages, and clans. These groups are not only economic and political units in their control of access to resources but also religious and ceremonial units, since they validate their control by means of religious ideology. Although there are chiefs, they are without power or authority. Control over resources is exercised by the group as a whole; this group may be a lineage, clan, or some other kin group, and its exclusionary policies are directed toward members of other groups, not to anyone within the group. Effective and direct control over land is generally exercised by those who cooperate regularly in productive activities and participate in common religious ritual.
The allocation of land is the central problem for all cultivators; the principles underlying this apportionment are integral features of a groupâs political organization. But the rules of allotting land do not grow in the abstract or in the minds of political theorists; they must, instead, be seen as aspects of the technology used in exploiting the habitat. When farming rests on hoes or digging sticks, every man can make and carry his own implements; as long as he can find a few men to help him clear an unclaimed and unused plot of land, he can pretty much go and do as he pleases and allocative rules must account for this. But as soon as a strong organization is able to gain monopolistic control over any indispensable resourcesâwhether land or instruments of productionâa man is subject to its political authority and there is a change in the rules by which resources are allocated.
But even when a cultivator controls his own instruments of production in a stateless horticultural society, he is not completely free of political authority. Control over land in stateless societies is inseparable from political organization because without a groupâs permission to use land, a man and his household cannot live there; the group that allocates land also has complete control over its membership. Theoretically, this also means that the group can banish a nonconformist by the simple expedient of refusing him access to any of its land for cultivation. In this way, citizenship has a distinct economic base. Nominally, allocation of land rights is in the hands of a chief (or council) as representative and spokesman of the group, and the group expresses its will through him; sometimes, however, citing his prerogative as the communityâs principal representative with the ancestors, he may act independently. In any event, however, he has little coercive authority, and his status largely depends on his ability to maintain a following in addition to his hereditary status.
Chiefdoms are neither stateless nor state societies in the fullest sense of either term; they are on the borderline between the two. Having emerged out of stateless systems, they give the impression of being on their way to centralized states and exhibit characteristics of both. They continue to show features of statelessness in that local groupsâthough larger than in truly stateless societiesâfrequently split and always retain autonomy in economic and jural relationships. The basic unit of productive activity continues to be the household but, heralding a nation-state organization of social relations, villages are joined in larger cooperative networks for purposes of production and consumption. At this stage of cultural development groups begin to produce surpluses; they do so under the impetus of their chiefs, who are obligated to redistribute the tributes they collect to the households that contributed them. These redistributions generally occur during ceremonial feasts. As we will see, surpluses in nation-states are also redistributed by those who speak in the name of the state, with the principal difference that they are generally redistributed to people who do not produce food, such as bureaucrats and indigents.
How are law and order maintained in stateless societies in view of the absence of coercive institutions such as police? These societies illustrate the fundamental errors of views of âhuman natureâ to explain social life. For example, Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, argued in the seventeenth century that man in a âstate of natureâ lived in a state of anarchy that conflicted with the wish to liveâendless war of all against all, aggression and insecurity, inability to keep the fruit of oneâs labor because everyone has a right to everything, and an absence of justice and injustice. The only way people may live together, Hobbes maintained, is for them to form a coercive political order; this alternative to the âanarchyâ of a âstate of natureâ was for him a logical outgrowth of the âlaw of natureâ according to which man desired to live.
For Jean Jacques Rousseau of the eighteenth century, author of The Social Contract, organized social life sets men apart and makes them enemies. In Emile, he wrote that âthe greatest good is not authority, but liberty.â Community life, he maintained, entailed a complete surrender of all individual rights. A logical outgrowth of this concept was his idea that the state entailed only one supreme power to which everyone was subordinate; he thus excluded any balance or equilibrium of powers. Rousseauâs view of the incompatibility of individual rights and the sovereignty of political institutions led to his famous idea of the social contract, in which individuals surrendered rights by consensus in a tradeoff for the rights they merely seem to have surrendered.
Like Hobbes, Rousseau began with an axiomatic âstate of nature.â In the light of this it may be said that one of anthropologyâs singular contributions to thought has been the empirical demonstration that there is no such thing. However, these ideas are still with us, both in political theories and in the rhetoric of politics. Hobbesâ ideas appear in modern dress in the underlying premises of positions like âlaw-and-orderâ while Rousseau evokes ideas such as peopleâs actions are forced on them by the political system and that no one can be held accountable for acts that others regard as detrimental to the common weal. If anthropology has one lesson to teach it is that the institutions by which people live rest on the bedrock of their relationships with the habitat, on the sources of potential energy that they have been able to harness. Homo sapiens cannot be characterized in any single set of terms.
In hunting-gathering groups, the maintenance of law and order has to be viewed against the background of their strategy of adaptation: the necessity for groups to split up recurrently to keep down pressure on available resources, the fact that neither groups nor individuals have exclusive rights to resources, the related fact that there are no chiefs with the power or authority to enforce decisions, and the strong emphasis on kinship in daily social relationships. When disputes break out among nomadic hunter-gatherers, one or both partners to an argument pack up and go to join another camp, and this technique fits well with their ecological realities. Owning few articles and having no deep attachment to any territory, they are able to split off from each other with considerable ease when necessary. But splitting off from the camp is generally a last resort. All hunting-gathering societies have a variety of techniques, usually symbolic in form, for trying to keep tensions within reasonable bounds. These techniques may include witchcraft and sorcery, joking and ribaldry, and competitive singing in which the parties to a dispute defend their positions and the assembled members of the community judge who is the victor (as among some Eskimo groups). Only when such techniques fail, when feelings get out of hand and violence breaks out, will people leave for another camp, for several hours or months or permanently.
Because local groups among hunter-gatherers do not have exclusive rights over resources and because every member of a local group has an equal right to hunt and gather over a territory, there are no chiefs or other authorities who can enforce decisions by threatening to withhold access to resources. Individuals may try to settle quarrels, but whether they succeed depends entirely on their prestige and the willingness of the disputants to abide by their recommendations. Authority of this kind develops only at more advanced levels of adaptation, when it becomes possible for the head or representative of a group to deprive people of resources or access to them. Among hunter-gatherers, then, every man has to settle his own disputes and each seeks to enforce resolutions at best he can.
The legal systems of stateless cultivators are quite different, because cultivation makes different demands on people and because the institutional requirements by which people live are changed by this technological development. The most important difference between hunter-gatherers and cultivators is in their relationship to land; in horticultural societies, groups acquire exclusive rights to land and individuals are given rights to use portions of this territory. These rights are secured through membership in the groupâusually based on considerations of kinshipâand both rights (to land and to membership in the group) are inherited. This is inevitably reflected in the legal system.
Sedentism, the investment of personal energy in tracts of land, and the commingling and inheritance of group membership and rights in land lead to the development of rules of property in cultivatorsâ legal systems to an extent never found among hunter-gatherers. At the same time, the fact that cultivable land is generally in limited supply means that ultimate control over its distribution to individuals and households must be vested in the groupsâsuch as lineages and clansâthat have exclusive rights to it. This is one of the most important factors in the development of chieftainship or headmanship among cultivators; and whether the head of a kin group ever exercises his right to deprive members of access to land, this theoretical power is basic to his authority in resolving disputes or punishing transgressions. Very often this power is cast in magical or religious terms, and this reflects the commingling of legal, religious, kin, and economic institutions in stateless cultivating societies.
In summary, stateless societies represent a very complex concept; their authority structures and means for maintaining order and conformity, however, are diffuse and characterized by very simple apparatuses of government. There are âoffices,â but no enduring hierarchies of authority in the sense in which we know them in a nation-state. Headmen, where found, inherit their positions, but they rarely have the means or right to enforce decisions; their leadershipâwhether for warfare or coordination of productive activitiesârests on the willingness of others to follow them, and this in turn depends largely on their personal qualities. Sometimes, as among North American Plains Indians, a group may have several headmen or chiefs who have overlapping areas of authority.
There are several sources, in addition to Friedâs book cited in the text, that can be consulted by the reader who wants to read more about stateless societies. Most of these sources are British; American anthropologists are relative late-comers to the study of political systems. Moreover, most of these sources pay only scant attention to the overall adaptive strategies in which particular political systems are set. African Political Systems, edited by Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, paperback edition), first published in 1940, contains case studies of three stateless and five state societies; it is generally regarded as the cornerstone of modern anthropological studies of political organization. Primitive Government, by Lucy Mair (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962) is a more discursive attempt to show that all societies exhibit systems of government and law; the book provides a very clear distinction between the diffuseness of authority in a stateless society and the principle of âsovereigntyâ in more complex political systems. Tribes without Rulers, edited by John Middleton and David Tait (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958) focuses on six segmentary African societies. (This concept is discussed in Selection 14.) Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, by I. Schapera (London: Watts, 1956), ranges from hunter-gatherers to early African nation-states.
Two books by Max Gluckman are especially noteworthy: Custom and Conflict in Africa (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1955) focuses on the ways in which order and conformity are maintained in tribal society and on the incompatibilities of the different groupings that command allegiance in stateless societies. Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (New York: New American Library, 1968, paperback edition), like Schaperaâs book, spans stateless and state societies; these two eminent anthropologists are in sharp disagreement on many important issues. Political Anthropology, edited by Marc J. Swartz, Victor W. Turner, and Arthur Tuden (Chicago: Aldine, 1966) and Local-Level Politics, edited by Swartz (Chicago: Aldine, 1968) present case studies of political organization ranging from tribal to modern societies, as does Comparative Political Systems, edited by Ronald Cohen and John Middleton (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1967).
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