Stateless Societies

It is tempting to assume that social order requires a state -- a formal government with laws, courts, police and administrators. Anthropological fieldwork conducted more than sixty years ago on societies without any such apparatus showed this assumption to be false: order and cooperation can be, and are, maintained through purely informal mechanisms, without anything resembling a modern government.

In these stateless societies, several kinds of informal arrangement did the work that formal government institutions do elsewhere. One was a balanced opposition between different parts of the society -- rival lineages or groups whose mutual rivalry was itself structured in ways that prevented any one group from dominating permanently, producing a rough equilibrium rather than chaos. A second was a web of cross-cutting alliances, built through kinship, marriage and shared residence, which meant that any two individuals or groups were typically linked to each other through several different social ties at once, giving everyone a stake in avoiding open, prolonged conflict. A third was the role of rites and ceremonies, which brought together both friends and rivals in shared ritual participation, reinforcing bonds and providing regular, structured occasions for reconciling tensions rather than letting them fester. …