Q.What is a ‘stateless society’? Describe some of the informal mechanisms through which order and cooperation are maintained in such societies.

A stateless society has no formal government apparatus, yet anthropological studies show order is still maintained through several informal mechanisms. …

A stateless society, as the chapter defines it, is one which lacks the formal institutions of government that a modern state possesses. For a long time it might have seemed obvious that some such formal apparatus is necessary for a society to hold together at all without collapsing into disorder; anthropological fieldwork conducted more than sixty years ago, studying societies that genuinely lacked any such apparatus, overturned this assumption by documenting, in detail, how these societies nonetheless maintained real, functioning social order.

Three informal mechanisms stand out in this research. The first is a balanced opposition between different parts of the society, typically rival lineages or clans, whose rivalry with one another was itself structured in a way that prevented any single segment from permanently overpowering the rest -- producing a rough, self-correcting equilibrium instead of either total chaos or a single dominant ruler. The second is a network of cross-cutting alliances, built through kinship, marriage and shared residence, which linked members of what might otherwise be rival groups to one another through multiple overlapping social ties at once; this gave everyone involved a genuine personal stake in avoiding open, prolonged conflict, since a serious break with a rival group might also mean breaking ties with one's own relatives by marriage. The third is the role of rites and ceremonies, which regularly brought together members of opposing or rival groups -- described as both friends and foes -- in shared ritual participation, giving societies a recurring, structured occasion on which underlying tensions could be worked through rather than left to build up unchecked. …