Stateless society

A stateless society is a society that is not governed by a state. In stateless societies, there is little concentration of authority; most positions of authority that do exist are very limited in power and are generally not permanently held positions; and social bodies that resolve disputes through predefined rules tend to be small.^[1] Stateless societies are highly variable in economic organization, and cultural practices.^[2]

For most of human history people have lived in stateless societies. However, few stateless societies exist today, since most of them have been coerced into integrating with the state-based societies around that surround them.^[3]

Prehistoric peoples

In archaeology, cultural anthropology and history, a stateless society denotes a less complex human community without a state, such as a tribal society, a clan, a band society or a chiefdom. The main criterion of "complexity" used is the extent to which a division of labor has occurred such that many people are permanently specialized in particular forms of production or other activity, and depend on others for goods and services through trade or sophisticated reciprocal obligations governed by custom and laws. An additional criterion is population size. The bigger the population, the more relationships have to be reckoned with.^{[citation needed]}

Evidence of the earliest known city-states has been found in ancient Mesopotamia around 3700 BC, suggesting that the history of the state is in truth less than 6,000 years old; thus, for most of human prehistory the state did not exist. Since homo sapiens has existed for about 200,000 years, it implies that state-organized societies have existed for at most 3% of the whole epoch of recognizably "human" history.^{[citation needed]}

The anthropologist Robert L. Carneiro comments:

"For 99.8 percent of human history people lived exclusively in autonomous bands and villages. At the beginning of the Paleolithic [i.e. the stone age], the number of these autonomous political units must have been small, but by 1000 B.C. it had increased to some 600,000. Then supra-village aggregation began in earnest, and in barely three millenia the autonomous political units of the world dropped from 600,000 to 157. In the light of this trend, the continued decrease from 157 to 1 seems not only inescapable but close at hand" - ^[4]

One could dispute about "157 autonomous political units" (sovereign states) insofar as regional governments can, in large countries, also function more or less autonomously, but the general historical trend is undeniable. Generally speaking, the archaeological evidence suggests that the state emerged out of stateless communities only when a fairly large population (at least tens of thousands of people) was more or less settled together in a particular territory, and practiced agriculture, rather than being nomadic hunters and gatherers. Indeed, one of the typical functions of the state is the defense of territory. Nevertheless, there are exceptions: Lawrence Krader for example describes the case of the Tatar state, a political authority arising among confederations of clans of nomadic or semi-nomadic herdsmen^[5]

Characteristically the state functionaries (royal dynasties, soldiers, scribes, servants, administrators, lawyers, tax collectors, religious authorities etc.) are mainly not self-supporting, but rather materially supported and financed by taxes and tributes contributed by the rest of the working population. This assumes a sufficient level of labor-productivity per capita which at least makes possible a permanent surplus product (principally foodstuffs) appropriated by the state authority to sustain the activities of state functionaries. Such permanent surpluses were generally not produced on a significant scale in smaller tribal or clan societies.^[6]

The archaeologist Gregory Possehl has argued however that there is no evidence that the relatively sophisticated, urbanized Harappan civilization, which flourished from about 2,500 to 1,900 BC in the Indus region, featured anything like a centralized state apparatus. No evidence has yet been excavated locally of palaces, temples, a ruling sovereign or royal graves, a centralized administrative bureaucracy keeping records, or a state religion - all of which are elsewhere usually associated with the existence of a state apparatus^[7].

Similarly, in the earliest large-scale human settlements of the stone age which have been discovered, such as Çatal Höyük and Jericho, no evidence was found of the existence of a state authority. The Çatal Höyük settlement of a farming community (7,300 BC to circa 6,200 BC) spanned circa 13 hectares (32 acres) and probably had about 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants.^[8].

Modern state based societies regularly pushed out stateless indigenous populations as their settlements expanded.^[9]

Social and economic organization

Anthropologists have found that social stratification is not the standard among all societies. John Gowdy writes, "Assumptions about human behaviour that members of market societies believe to be universal, that humans are naturally competitive and acquisitive, and that social stratification is natural, do not apply to many hunter-gatherer peoples."^[10]

The economies of stateless agricultural societies tend to focus and organize subsistence agriculture at the community level, and tend to diversify their production rather than specializing in a particular crop.^[11]

In many stateless societies, conflicts between families are resolved by appealing to the community. Each of the sides of the dispute will voice their concerns, and the community, often voicing it's will through village elders will reach a judgment on the situation. Even when there is no legal or coercive authority to enforce these community decisions, people tend to adhere to them, due to a desire to be held in esteem by the community.^[12]

References

^ Ellis, Stephen (2001). The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War. NYU Press. p. 198. ISBN 9780814722190.
^ Béteille, André (2002). "Inequality and Equality". In Ingold, Tim (ed.). Companion encyclopedia of anthropology. Taylor & Francis. pp. 1042–1043. ISBN 9780415286046.
^ Faulks, Keith (2000). Political sociology: a critical introduction. NYU Press. p. 23. ISBN 9780814727096.
^ Robert L. Carneiro, "Political expansion as an expression of the principle of competitive exclusion", p. 219 in: Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service (eds.), Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978.
^ Krader, Formation of the state. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hallm, 1968, chapter 6
^ Henri J.M. Claessen & Peter Skalnik (eds.), The Early State. The Hague: Mouton, 1978
^ Gregory L. Possehl, "Sociocultural complexity without the state: the Indus civilization", in: Gary M. Feinman and Joyce Marcus (eds.), Archaic States. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1998, pp. 261–291
^ Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past, 2nd edition. Thames & Hudson, 2009, p. 222)
^ Richards, John F. (2004). The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. University of California Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 9780520246782.
^ Gowdy, John (2006) "Hunter-gatherers and the mythology of the market," in Richard B. Lee and Richard H. Daly (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, p. 391. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-60919-4
^ Chase, Diane Z. & Chase, Arlen F. (2003). Mesoamerican Elites: An Archaeological Assessment. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 23. ISBN 9780806135427.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^ Fleming, Thomas (1993). The Politics of Human Nature. Transaction Publishers. pp. 165–166. ISBN 9781560006930.

Stateless society

Prehistoric peoples

Social and economic organization

See also

References

Further reading