Stateless Geographies and Modalities of Refusal: The Primitive and The Modern
- Madiha Tariq
- 6 days ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
As published in the Volume 2(2) of Ramjas Political Review
Abstract
The state’s dominance as a political form obscures alternatives that reject centralised authority. Addressing that assumption, this paper examines stateless societies as distinct modes of governance which resist the rationality of modern states. Contrary to Eurocentric assumptions that render them primitive or transitory, these societies cultivate egalitarian, non-coercive structures that decentralise power through collective decision-making. These systems are not relics of history but demonstrate how governance without domination is not only possible but also practical in cultivating social justice and participatory political systems. Thus, its theoretical implications extend beyond academic discourse, urging a rethinking of governance models.
Keywords: Stateless societies, Coercion, Decentralisation, Governance models, Participatory politics
Introduction
The dawn of the 21st century witnessed the culmination of various schools of thought, all centralising the role of the state as the principal locus in comparative social science research, but especially as the protagonist, the prime actor in political praxis. Almost eight decades past the Second World War and the consequent reorganisation of the world order, states continue to occupy a central position in all political discourses. Such centrality lubricates not only a theoretical global framework but extends equally to governance and judicial models in different parts of the world. The state as a centralised institution exists almost invariably and decidedly as an omnipotent regulator of political and personal experiences of modern life. In analysing the present, past, and future of such centrality, one begins to seek alternative methods of organising people and wonder whether they exist, in the world as it stands today. To that end, an inquiry into the nature of governance model(s) of stateless societies and how they are distinguished from the state offers a holistic perspective on the ostensible timelessness, and rational location of the state, apart from providing a comparative analysis of the two systems of organisation.
This paper builds on such antagonism between the state and stateless societies to situate their points of differentiation by placing ‘power’—its location, distribution, and intensity as the vantage point of this enquiry. I argue that power is the abstraction where the conceptions of both state and statelessness emanate from, and it is precisely this power that the form of organisation thus established manifests. Power, then, is the motivator of the state and also the logic of statelessness. Accordingly, I will split the paper, after the introduction, into three sections, mapping power as dominative, centralised, and coercive, respectively. I will explore what it is in the nature of power, or in its various conceptions, that allow for, on one hand, a didactic duality in the two forms of organising people, and on the other hand, its indispensability in both of them. In doing so, I shall be able to reflect on alternative governance model(s) which, although existing in a stateless framework, provide promising lessons for advancing social justice and decentralised governance systems in the present world. In a world increasingly shaped by crises of governance, the theoretical examination of stateless societies challenges entrenched assumptions about the political indispensability of the modern state and ideas of its inevitability, inaugurated by Eurocentric modernity. By contributing to the broader debates within political anthropology, I intend to create space for the exploration of governance models that transcend hierarchical and centralised paradigms.
On Dominance
To begin with, most evolutionary and functional analyses agree with, if not end at, one common characteristic of the state—that out of all other social groups, it is the one that rises above and exercises dominance. Weber (1919/2004) invokes the idea of politics as the leadership of one over the other reflected in the relations of people with the state. To him, an asymmetric dynamic created by Herrschaft2—power that one exercises over the other—bridges the state and the people (Weber, 1919/2004). The state, therefore, is a project of domination that creates a relationship between the governed and the governing bodies.3 An idea of this sort is best read in continuum with the Lockean tradition of the social contract in which the original equality and mutually experienced freedom of the state of nature is morphed into a consensual concentration of power in a few pockets that exist to limit people’s executive equality in relation to one another (Locke, 1690/1823, p. 106). Such concentration begins at the emergence of civil societies and is crystallised in the formation of a state.
Such domination can further be conceptualised in two ways: as power organised by diverting it to selected bodies of people and secondly, as an abstract system of rules that is above any individual or social group. In both cases, a power-yielding faculty exercises control over the general masses. In the former, the faculty is an institution comprising certain individuals, whereas the latter features a socially sanctioned body of rules, not represented by specific people. Following both Weber’s theoretical association of politics, and leadership with parties and politicians as well as our empirical observations, modern states underscore the former logic. It is this point of differentiation, of the state organising ‘domination’ by offering it to a distinct few who are the bearers of such power, that at once, distinguishes a state from a stateless society. Moreover, it is this very concentration of power that limits the scope of inclusive, grassroots, and participatory governance as policy increasingly becomes the subject matter of the power elite.
In all definitions and contestations of the state, this central idea experiences permanency—Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), Marx and Engels’ committee for Bourgeoises (1848), Weber’s force monopoly (1919/2004) Tilly’s protection racket (1990) and Olson’s stationary bandit (2000), all show the existence of a supreme body that rises above the ordinary individual. In stateless societies, however, the domination exercised is abstract. That is to say, that while a body of rules is supreme to any single individual, there is no group of people which embodies that supremacy. Rules and by extension, domination, are mutually reinforced by one over the other through a sense of collective personhood established in social acts. Hence, while power in the modern state is manifested physically in the government and there exist governors against the governed, stateless societies refuse such concentration of power. Instead, the governors in a stateless society are the abstract rules of collectivity, codes of membership, and belonging, materially reinforced by everyone over everyone. In such societies, no one is governed by another and no one governs the other, yet they all mutually reinforce the governance of their collective rules over one another.
Here, it becomes crucial to exemplify such abstract and diffused governance that I have thus far explained in theory. Clastres (1974/1989) provides a detailed account of primitive societies,4 which exist in their very resistance to modern statecraft and practices of state formation. Such societies, he explains, are anchored in rites of passage—ceremonies of initiation into the social framework—undertaken by committing law to writing on the bodies of young people. These acts of writing the law include piercings, tattoos, and other rigorous forms of what may colloquially be called “torture”. Such acts of torture serve several ideological functions: first, as the measurement of an individual’s “stoicism” and “mettle” (p. 142). It also exists as an instrument of memory (p. 143), a constant reminder of the overarching collective which “marks” the individual and exists in them as much as their personal identities. The rituals of initiation gradually transform the body as a carrier of these memories to the body becoming the memory itself (p. 143). Both ideological functions indicate a greater, more fundamental reasoning—that of society being universal, transcendental, and above the individual. “You are one of us and you will not forget it,” as quoted by a Guayaki man captures the essence of this sport (p. 143). Hence, these rituals serve as mechanisms for embedding social norms within individuals, making adherence to these norms a deeply internalised practice rather than one imposed through force. Here, governance exists as a diffused and participatory process rather than reliant on coercive structures.
This is where the differentiation becomes strikingly visible—when the constant reminder of society being greater than the self is pushed by one’s own body, it is an obvious declaration that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the ‘total’ nature of such stateless societies that defines them as opposed to the potential of totalitarian tendencies that modern states often exhibit. What is higher than the self exists in the community of all individuals together and must be preserved against each individual by all others. Unsurprisingly, then, in societies with a state, what is higher than the self exists not in the community of all but a chosen few who represent the community.5 An organisation of this sort delivers two important implications: one that such societies, in the absence of designated bearers of power, work as impressive models of local, participatory governance. Secondly, by virtue of being antithetical to the concentration of vested interests, they birth possibilities of a culture of social justice that can stand the challenges of time and age.
On Centralisation and Resource Distribution
Accordingly, this conceptual difference also translates to routine practices of exercising power. In that, all activities concerning the people follow a top-down sequence in a state; the ownership and management of tangible and intangible public resources is imperative to the state. All provisions to the public, of resources and even rights, trickle down from this powerful centre. In contrast, because there is no greater entity ‘separate’ from the people6 in stateless societies, power and provision are diffused as opposed to centralised. An example is the contrast between the distribution of public goods in states and gift economies in stateless societies.
It is in this vein that Weber (1919/2004) discusses the installation and sustenance of order as the hallmark of states, aimed at promoting law and order on one hand and upholding the supremacy of the state, on another (p. 82). Slater (2010) who traces the development of authoritarian regimes, also established a general relationship between a state’s sustenance and its provision of resources. As per him, it is the existence of a “provision pact” between the citizens and the state from which general consensus flows, and the state continues to exist. The idea of a provision pact implies that the state and the citizens share a relationship that is cultivated vis-à-vis resources. It also demonstrates how the resources are centrally owned and allocated to the periphery as and when the state deems it necessary.
In contrast, stateless societies are often marked by gift economies in which elaborate public rituals are held to exchange an enormous range of goods within and between social groups.7 A failure to give depreciates a person’s social and moral value, and the inability to reciprocate, in turn, may invite catastrophic harm (Mauss, 1925). The obligatory exchange of resources as gifts to the extent that such giving establishes and reinforces one’s social status allows resources to not settle at one centre, and continuously move around people, thereby defying possibilities of centralised ownership or singular claims. Unlike the state, where governance often becomes a tool of domination, stateless systems rely on moral obligations and symbolic authority to sustain social cohesion.
Mauss (1925, p. 193) refers to this phenomenon as a “total social fact[s]” since economies of this kind are motivated by various kinds of social forces which operate together, in tandem with one another. Such economies are dictated by religious and cultural factors as much as political ones. As such, that renders it impossible to separate one social force from the other or rank them based on their relative significance. Unlike the state, life in stateless societies8 cannot have a separate and centralised institution which performs the function of allocating resources. Stateless societies breed and support various forms of sociality and institutions which often intersect and overlap. For example, Mauss (1925) refers to the Northwest American Potlatch, as a juridical, religious, mythological, shamanistic, military, economic, and legal practice for the things offered are often elements in the “traffic of souls and things blended together with one another” (p. 147). Conversely, where a normative modern state exists, it is the sole dictator of how resources are distributed in the society and other ways of organising social life are discouraged as either primitive or futile.
However, any analysis of gift economies in the context of their totality is situated on a sloppy slope, susceptible to false moralist conclusions. To that, the explanation is that while gift economies indeed insist on a diffused allocation of resources, they are not necessarily at a moral pinnacle. Gift economies, in fact, are often based on agonism, destruction,9 and large-scale threats against the fulfilment of obligations. It is not the moral high ground but the logistical lack of a centralised, separate entity to perform functions, one of which is resource allocation, that distinguishes a state from a stateless society. Therefore, the inference must not be mistaken as necessarily a call to fall into the anarchist prism of statelessness, but rather, to take appropriate lessons from such societies and integrate them into our practices of statecraft in the direction of empowered local governance, and stronger codes of social justice.
Furthermore, outside the purview of gift economies, another interesting demonstration of this decentralisation of power is Clastres’ (1974/1989) account of the relationship between power and speech in primitive societies. The power of speech underscores a certain kind of discursive function that is accorded to the figure of the leader. In such societies, while the highest form of power—the power of speech—is accorded to the chief, it is not capable of imposing commands over the people but is only a manifestation of a ritual obligation. The obligation, ironically, is enforced on the chief and not the people. In fact, people do not pay any attention to the chief’s discourse and render it insignificant. Even the inattentiveness is ritualised. The goal is to give the chief a sense of power only to underscore the lack of it. The caricature of the chief as a speaking body who no one listens to permits the society to resist a separate “repository of power invested in the chief” (p. 157).
On Coercion and Violence
Finally, in following the state’s dominating and centralising tendencies as an institution separate from the general public, the modern state often employs coercion as a tool to secure this position. This coercion is regulated through law, both complementing and reinforcing one another. In describing a state, Weber (1919/2004) isolates coercion or the monopoly to legitimate violence that the state exercises with respect to other institutions as the distinguishing factor from other organisations. That is not to say that violence does not originate in bodies other than the state or that violence is necessary to the working of a state at all times, but that only the state has an exclusive right to violence, and this right is protected and fundamentally legitimised by the social design. Weber (1919/2004) delineates three such forms of legitimation—charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. A modern state, while not necessarily pure in this distinction, is an emblem of rational-legal domination, and thus, its coercive powers are embedded in provisions of legality, id est, coded in law (p. 34). Coercion, as an instrument of domination, facilitates a state’s perpetual domination in a society.
On Statelessness and Conclusion
However, any study concerning the differences between the two forms of organising society—with the state and without it—is incomplete without filtering out what may be called “Conceptual Poverty” (Clastres, 1974/1989, p. 16) of associating an evolutionary trajectory to stateless societies by predicting their eventual transition into societies with states, as and when they develop in space and time. Not only are they far from reality, but such assumptions cause significant skewness in both the method and outcomes of approaching stateless societies. Such ideas of an inevitable progression of society from stateless geographies to modern states with delimited territories is a result of Eurocentric systems of thought, birthed by the caricature of modernity. Such cognitive faculties make at least two basic assumptions: One that the stateless societies are governed by apolitical, primitive, and irrational beliefs, and secondly, that real political power, as in modern states, will inevitably lead to coercion. However, while stateless societies do not operate under a framework of coercion and physical force, they are not necessarily apolitical. Politics and power are inherent to stateless societies—from wars to exogamic matrimonial alliances, power dynamics are continuously at play (Clastres, 1974/1989, p. 65-74). Yet, what is different is that this power is diffused and offered to everyone, and thus, negated in this very act of offering.
This balance of extending power without the resultant domination may be unknown to the West-dominated New World Order but exists nevertheless, not only, in a passive capacity to prevent a coercive, centralised state, but especially in actively refusing to have one. One can give several examples of which the most famous continues to be that of Trobriands, a set of islands to the east of New Guinea. Malinowski (1922), considered to be the pioneer of anthropological studies involved with stateless societies, wrote extensive ethnographic accounts of the Melanesian society. Then began a tradition of scholarly attention towards such groups in Oceania, Africa, and Eastern India among others. Refusal, to them, is not only an act of denial but a collaborative approach of the public, and the systems they create, to oppose a potential centralised state. These societies may never have witnessed a state, and so, may not be able to refuse the state in its empirical understanding. Yet, their existence is inherently a call against coercive and centralised power which are the distinguishing characteristics of a state. The refusal is a reflection of their political acumen, and is politically “generative” and “strategic” (McGranahan, 2016).10 It creates a form of social organisation and cultural vocabulary that rigid states with fixed centers can not cultivate. Put simply, the function of social refusal is not inert; it produces a new social formation. In that, stateless societies are not necessarily historical objects or primitive frameworks subject to compulsory evolution, which have exhausted their relevance. James C Scott’s work on state avoidance, too, provides a useful counterpoint to the inevitability of state formation. Scott (2009) theorises that many stateless societies, particularly in Southeast Asia, are not merely primitive relics but are intentionally organised to evade state domination. Hence, the absence of a state is not always a product of underdevelopment but a deliberate political strategy to maintain autonomy.
Therefore, if it is the separation of the society and the governing bodies, incentivised by the right to coercive domination that differentiates states from stateless societies, the logical limit of such coercive domination is the inability of people to participate in the process of governance. It ultimately also translates to the impossibility of a language of local governance and social justice. That is why the social design and political organisation of stateless societies offer many lessons for modern states to, at the least, improve their local governance and social justice gradients. Hence, the theoretical implications of such models extend beyond academic discourse; they urge a rethinking of participatory governance practices and social justice initiatives in contemporary contexts. In the long term, it makes a case for ideas like anarchism—often used pejoratively—as the projected rationality and orderliness of the modern state begin to crumble.
References
Clastres, P. (1989). Society against the state: Essays in political anthropology (R. Hurley, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work
published 1974)
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan. Andrew, C. (Ed.). Reprint: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Locke, J. (1823). Essay two. In R. Hay (Ed.), Two treatises of government (pp. 106–202). McMaster University Archive of
the History of Economic Thought. (Original work published 1690)
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: an Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of
Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). The Communist manifesto. Retrieved from
Mauss, M. (1925). The gift (J. Guyer, Trans.). Hau Books.
McGranahan, C. (2016). Theorizing refusal: An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 319–
Olson, M. (2000). Power and prosperity: Outgrowing communist and capitalist dictatorships. Basic Books.
Scott, J. C. (2009). The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.
Slater, D. (2010). Ordering power. Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1992. Blackwell.
Weber, M. (2004). The vocation lectures (D. Owen & T. B. Strong, Eds.; R. Livingstone, Trans.). Hackett Publishing
Company. (Original work published 1919)
Endnotes
Political scientist Peter Evans coined the phrase “Bringing the State Back In” in 1985, emphasising the state’s existence as an active agent in determining organisation within and outside itself, and having its own dynamics. Various ideological strands including the Marxists, and then Marxist feminists, have stressed the cruciality of the state in modern political discourses.
It is used in German to indicate God’s lordship and dominion.
For a detailed analysis, Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ concept may be perused.
It is imperative to note that “primitive” in this context is not chronological but conceptual. Primitive does not stand as a synonym for archaic for reasons the essay discusses later.
This discussion assumes merit not on a normative basis but especially for logistical reasons. Many would claim that since democracy—the pinnacle of Weber’s Modern state—involves the mass election of the chosen few, they do not entirely oppose the communal sense of stateless societies. To that, a statistical and mostly procedural explanation is required. Since electoral procedures are fraught with difficulties of social choice theory, no election will ever manifest in a pure execution of the general will. Hence representation in democracies is close to, but not the same as collective personhood in stateless societies.
The moral codes are embodied by people collectively and are, therefore, internal to them and their civilisation.
From what Malinowski calls ‘worthless trinkets’ to valuable things like precious stones, armshells, and even other social resources.
And by extension, in those with gift economies.
As in the case of Kula.
To explore “refusal” in cultural anthropology, see McGranahan (2016).
The author, Madiha Tariq, is a student at Ashoka University.
Featured image credit: Britannica
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