Notes

[1] Representing the conservative end of the academic spectrum, with narratives that are frequently Eurocentric and state-privileging, we have the collection edited by Grinin, Bondarenko, et al. They acknowledge that “nowadays postulates about the state as the only possible form of political and sociocultural organization of the post-primitive society, about a priori higher level of development of a state society in comparison with any non-state one do not seem so undeniable as a few years ago. It has become evident that the non-state societies are not necessarily less complex and less efficient” (Bondarenko, Grinin, and Korotayev, “Alternatives of Social Evolution” in The Early State, its Alternatives and Analogs, edited by Leonid E. Grinin, Robert L. Carneiro, Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Nikolay N. Kradin, and Andrey V. Korotayev [Volgograd, Russia: Uchitel Publishing House, 2004], 5). Note that while questioning the unilineal statist mythology, the idea that history comes down on a single track, called progress—thus the present social forms are the best yet—they still cleave to Eurocentric and ultimately statist concepts like “primitive,” linear complexity (as in, more or less complex, utilizing culturally specific criteria that favor Western civilization). They also frequently impose Western meanings that privilege a certain, cynical vision of power in human relations, on social structures, customs, and interactions in societies operating under a completely different paradigm, without showing the slightest courtesy of acknowledging the meanings and values as they are understood in those societies. On the parasitical nature of states, see James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For examples of stateless societies organizing complex infrastructure and technologies, see Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works (Berkeley: Ardent Press, 2010).

[2] See, for example, the history of resistance under the British Empire, Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[3] Though primitivism is usually the only one of these approaches accused of ideological cherry-picking, they all bring to their historical analysis the very vision they seek to prove; to primitivism, history is a lie covering the primary evil of civilization; to dialectical materialism it is an objective tension of productive forces; and to environmental determinism a mechanistic and humanistic belief that everyone, everywhere, is the same, moved only by the primacy of that physical environment which can be claimed to predate and thus determine human activity. See Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) for the materialist view; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997) for environmental determinism; and on primitivism John Zerzan, Future Primitive and Other Essays (New York: Autonomedia, 1994).

[4] Bakunin “Rousseau’s Theory of the State” (1873) and Statism and Anarchy (1873), Leonid E. Grinin, “The Early State and Its Analogs: A Comparative Analysis,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, edited by Grinin, Carneiro, Bondarenko, et al., 88–136; and Dmitri M. Bondarenko, “Kinship, Territoriality and the Early State Lower Limit,” in Social Evolution and History 7, No. 1, edited by Henri J.M. Claessen, Ernée Hagesteijn, and Pieter van de Velde (Moscow: Uchitel Publishing House, 2008), 19–53.

[5] Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley, Abe Stein (1974; repr., New York: Zone Books, 1989). Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy,” Current Anthropology 34, No. 3 (June 1993).

[6] Clastres, Society Against the State, 49.

[7] Bondarenko, Grinin, and Korotayev, “Alternatives of Social Evolution,” 6.

[8] Clastres, Society Against the State, 194–95.

[9] Quotes and criticisms of Marxism from Tariq Khan’s “‘Come O Lions! Let Us Cause a Mutiny:’ Anarchism and the Subaltern,” Institute for Anarchist Studies, anarchiststudies.org, April 2, 2015, which summarizes the opposing takes of anarchism and Marxism on imperialism, peasant and indigenous populations, and anti-colonial movements. On the African mode of production, see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch Catherine, “Research on an African Mode of Production” in Perspectives on the African Past, edited by M.A. Klein and G.W. Johnson (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1972). For a typical Marxist view of a non-Western society practicing “primitive communism,” see L. Baudin, Une théocratie socialiste: l’État jésuite du Paraguay (Paris: Génin, 1962). Regarding the Guarani tribe, the author asserts that, “their mentality is that of a child” (14). And as we anarchists prefer to base our evaluations on actions rather than words, it is worth noting that every single Marxist-inspired regime to date has carried out genocidal policies against any indigenous or non-Western group within its borders, as it sought to impose its particular vision of the Western trajectory of economic development. This is nothing but a socialist alternative to the practices of the World Bank and IMF. We would do well to heed the insistence of a radical group of Mapuche at the forefront of their struggle for land reclamation: to identify themselves as proletarian would be to willingly complete the process of genocide that, in their case, has not yet fully erased their traditional, communal way of living. I think it is fair to assert that neither Marx nor the vast majority of Marxists who have had access to state power ever intended to allow “primitive communists” a place in their future world.

[10] See, for example, Harold Barclay, People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy (London: Kahn and Averill, 1996); and Ted Kaczynski, “Letter to a Turkish Anarchist,” theanarchistlibrary.org, 2003.

[11] Perlman, when he declares he is not an anarchist, does so in direct contrast to contemporaries of his who declare themselves anarchists but do not live up, in Perlman’s eyes, to the anarchist ideal. Perlman, meanwhile, consistently champions anarchy and anarchism.

[12] Though the word politogenesis was originally coined as a synonym for state formation, more recently, some scholars talk about non-state alternatives of politogenesis (e.g. Bondarenko, Grinin, Korotayev, “Altenatives of Social Evolution”). However, given their lack of interest in exploring the reality of anti-authoritarian societies (or more accurately, their interest in preventing the emergence of any such category), and given the anarchist critique of a fundamental social alienation resulting in the division of political and economic spheres, an alienation that is not present in all societies, I opt to use the term in its original sense.

[13] Others propose a four-level site-size hierarchy in the archaeological record to qualify as a state. This criterion requires four types of settlements, from the smallest—the household or hamlet—to the village, to the regional capital, to the largest—the supreme capital (H.T. Wright, “Recent Research on the Origin of the State,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6 (1977): 379–97). However, four levels of settlements could be incorporated in a three-tier political organization, as the smallest settlements would be too small to host agents of the central authority and would be politically dependent on the nearest village, the smallest unit to be organized by the central authority.

[14] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 211–12.

[15] Ibid., 258.

[16] Ibid.

[17] For a further elaboration of this view as it pertains to differing strategies in a social movement (direct democracy vs. anarchy), see Anonymous, “Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #SpanishRevolution,” CrimethInc., June 2011, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/barc.php. As it pertains to social theory, see Marianne Maeckelbergh, The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2009).

[18] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 212.

[19] Henk Rijkeboer, “History of the Dutch East India Company—The Asian Part,” European Heritage, 2011, http://european-heritage.org/netherlands/alkmaar/history-dutch-east-india-company-asian-part.

[20] R.A. Guisepi, ed., “Africa and the Africans in the Age of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” History World International, history-world.org (accessed January 7, 2016).

[21] Ibid.

[22] Eleonora L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 291.

[23] L. Irwin, “Cherokee Healing: Myth, Dreams, and Medicine,” American Indian Quarterly 16, No. 2 (1992).

[24] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 87–90, 110.

[25] Ibid., 91–92.

[26] Information on the maroon rebellions in Suriname, Jamaica, and Haiti can be found in Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Random House, 1963); and Wim S.M. Hoogbergen, The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990). Readers whose interest is in overthrowing states, not jut studying them, will also find the following source interesting: Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, “The Dragon and the Hydra,” 2010, https://russellmaroonshoats.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/the-dragon-and/.

[27] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961).

[28] I don’t know of any geographical society or academic institution that advocates the redesignation of Europe as a subcontinent; nonetheless only the obstinate self-importance of the white supremacists who founded such institutions can explain the continental classification. Not tectonically, not geographically, not historically, not even culturally can Europe qualify as a continent. On all grounds India has a far better claim to continent-hood.

[29] Inventing new terms can be an obnoxious habit; nonetheless in the literature on state formation I found no term for a body that acts intentionally and aggressively as a vessel and vector for state-making technologies and as a direct agent for state formation, but does not in itself constitute a state, lacking the requisite host population.

[30] Boehm (“Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy”) details the frequency with which leaders of stateless societies were deposed or even killed by others with less status. Among the two most frequent motives for such topplings are the perceived greediness and the authoritarianism of the leader.

[31] Tacitus singles out the Goths as the most “autocratic” of the Germanic tribes, “but not to such a degree that freedom is destroyed.” Tacitus, in The Agricola and the Germania, translated by H. Mattingly (98; repr., Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1948), 138.

[32] Arthur, though he is presented to us as a king, is a good example of a non-state leader: it is not institutional legitimation but charisma and magic attaining specifically to his person that he needs in order to rally his warriors, who sit together in a circle.

[33] Michal Tymowski, “State and Tribe in the History of Medieval Europe and Black Africa—A Comparative Approach,” in Social Evolution and History, 177.

[34] Ibid., 174.

[35] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, xi.

[36] Cited in ibid., 259, 264–65.

[37] Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, 98.

[38] Ibid., 108.

[39] Ibid., 118.

[40] Ibid., 122–23.

[41] Ibid., 114.

[42] David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Cambridge: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004).

[43] Dmitri V. Dozhdev, “Rome,” in Civilizational Models of Politogenesis, edited by Dmitri M. Bondarenko and Andrey V. Korotavey (Moscow: Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2000), 261.

[44] Ibid., 265.

[45] Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture: A Radical View of Western Civilization and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy (Boston: Fag Rag Books, 1978), 45.

[46] Ibid., 46.

[47] L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States,” 288–89.

[48] Ibid., 290.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

[51] L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States,” 295.

[52] Ibid., 295, 294–95.

[53] Ibid., 294.

[54] Tymowski, “State and Tribe in the History of Medieval Europe and Black Africa,” 174.

[55] Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902).

[56] R.B. Serjeant, quoted in Andrey V. Korotayev, “The Chiefdom: Precursor of the Tribe? (Some Trends of Political Evolution in North-East Yemeni Highlands),” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 301.

[57] Korotayev, “The Chiefdom,” 305 (earlier data from 300–301).

[58] This relationship was probably not as cynically threatening as it might seem, given that the tribes owed the “weak” castes a real responsibility. If unarmed dependents were harmed, it was a great dishonor for the tribe, and reparations or fines for any injury to such a person was much higher than if the injury were committed to a member of the tribe itself.

[59] Korotayev, “The Chiefdom,” 300–301.

[60] Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, tran. John Rothschild (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 262.

[61] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 155–56.

[62] Ibid., 158.

[63] Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 133.

[64] Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 229.

[65] Clastres, Society Against the State, 184.

[66] And it may be equally if not more true that academic Eurocentrism abetted the confusion. King, rex, roi, et cetera, originally denominated chiefs whose authority more often than not was temporary, charismatic, and/or primarily military. Centuries later, European monarchs, and the heads of true states, chose these same titles, perhaps to anoint themselves with an aura of historical continuity or eternal supremacy. In the modern era, early researchers did not know to distinguish kingdom-chiefdoms and statist monarchies, a problem they would not have had if the symbolic, mythologized term at play had been longko or nyimi rather than koning or rei.

[67] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 60.

[68] Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 279–82.

[69] Ibid., 53.

[70] As a demystifying aside, I would argue that the “scientific” conception should more accurately be labeled as “profane.” Enlightenment science, as Christianity before it, also justified itself as “natural,” though the Enlightenment’s nature was mechanical rather than sacred, and the sacred was supernatural and exogenous rather than chthonic and immanent. One way to elucidate this difference can be found in Zlodey and Radegas’s distinction between “production” and “creation,” since this is not a difference that Enlightenment thinking itself is capable of expressing.

[71] John Severino, “The Other Gods Were Crying,” theanarchistlibrary.org, 2010, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-severino-the-other-gods-were-crying.

[72] See Alex Gorrion, “Anarchy in World Systems: A Review of Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long 20th Century,” The Anvil Review (2014).

[73] Given his Marxist influences, Arrighi generally tries to privilege economic actors, though such emphasis is in no way justified by his findings. Equally interesting would be research that explores the origins of the other pillar of this biped: the state that sought financing beyond its own jurisdiction.

[74] The quote is not from the Church, but from Lenin, whose methods, and perhaps the man himself, would have been right at home in the Inquisition.

[75] R.I. Moore, The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe (London: Profile Books, 2012).

[76] At this point, there does not seem to be any serious scholarly research suggesting more than 50,000–60,000 executions. However, new research by Catalan scholar Pau Castell, which has yet to be translated into English, has discovered documentation of “hundreds” of previously unpublished executions in Catalunya and the Pyrenees, starting already by the beginning of the fifteenth century. These findings add a new epicenter to the burnings, paint a picture of a more rapid and geographically widespread beginning to the phenomenon, and also suggest a relation between the intensity of the witch hunts and the prevalence of municipal over centralized government, noting that royal courts were not as zealous as local governments and traveling preachers. David Marín, “Terra de Bruixes,” El Punt Avui, January 2, 2016, http://www.elpuntavui.cat/societat/article/-/929459-terra-de-bruixes.html.

[77] Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press, 1993). Argument made by Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996).

[78] Soraya Chemaly, “What witches have to do with women’s health,” Salon.com, October 31, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/10/31/what_witches_have_to_do_with_womens_health/Chemaly.

[79] David Algarra Bascón, El Comú Català (Barcelona: Potlatch Ediciones, 2015).

[80] Alex Gorrion, “Science,” The Anvil Review, May 29, 2015, http://theanvilreview.org/print/science/.

[81] Arrighi, The Long 20th Century, 47.

[82] Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, 140–41.

[83] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 162.

[84] Ibid., 280. The subsequent example of the Chin is from page 212.

[85] To be clear, I am not alleging that these three scourges were created by the State. However, the exploitation that accompanies states certainly makes famine more likely, and while epidemics are largely a function of population density that can, contrary to statist mythology, exist without states, state effects such as warfare and malnutrition in the majority lower classes sometimes provoke and always exacerbate epidemics. Stateless warfare tends to be qualitatively different, more a tradition of raiding or occasionally lethal sport.

[86] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 66.

[87] Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 170–73.

[88] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 67 and 72.

[89] Ibid., 26. For an excellent discussion of resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp, see Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South (Oakland: AK Press, 2015).

[90] Stafford and Shirley, Dixie Be Damned, 53–86.

[91] Thompson, Whigs and Hunters.

[92] A good book in English for exploring this pattern is Chris Ealham’s Anarchism and the City (Oakland: AK Press, 2010). The book contains a few minor but important flaws, which I discuss in my review (PG, “A Critical Review of Anarchism and the City,” The Anvil Review, May 24, 2012, http://theanvilreview.org/print/criticalreviewanarchismcity/), which professor Ealham considered libelous.

[93] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 190.

[94] Individual cases of joining the wildlings are mentioned. The only one explored at any length is that of Mance Rayder, a civilized man who joined the wildlings in order to lead them, giving them the organizational and military capacity they ostensibly lacked, not to destroy the state, but to shelter behind its ramparts, escaping from the true evil.

[95] Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 162.

[96] Patrick Chabal, Gary Feinman, and Peter Skalník, “Beyond States and Empires: Chiefdoms and Informal Politics,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 53.

[97] Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 24.

[98] Gord Hill, “Never Idle: Gord Hill on Indigenous Resistance in Canada,” The Portland Radicle, March 18, 2013, https://portlandradicle.wordpress.com/never-idle-gord-hill-on-indigenous-resistance-in-canada/.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Denis V. Vorobyov, “The Iroquois,” in Civilizational Models of Politogenesis, 157, 159.

[101] Ibid., “The Iroquois,” 160.

[102] Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 24.

[103] Vorobyov, “The Iroquois,” 157.

[104] Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 77.

[105] Nikolay N. Kradin, “Early State Theory and the Evolution of Pastoral Nomads,” in Social Evolution and History, 289.

[106] Tymowski, “State and Tribe in the History of Medieval Europe and Black Africa,” 173. He cites K.F. Werner, Structures politiques du monde franc (VI – XII siècles) (London: Ashgate-Variorum, 1979).

[107] Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 235–36.

[108] Tymowski, “State and Tribe in the History of Medieval Europe and Black Africa,” 176.

[109] Bondarenko, “From Local Communities to Megacommunity: Biniland in the 1st Millennium B.C. to the 19th Century A.D.,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 326.

[110] Ibid., 327–28.

[111] Ibid., 329.

[112] Ibid., 332.

[113] This and the subsequent quote are from ibid., 334.

[114] Ibid., 335, 338–39.

[115] Ibid., 342–43.

[116] Leonid E. Grinin, “Early State and Democracy,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, responding to Moshe Berent, “Greece: The Stateless Polis (11th to 4th Centuries B.C.)” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 364–87.

[117] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 226–34.

[118] For example, see the discussion of Gandhi and King in Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Signalfire Press, 2005).

[119] Lev Zlodey and Jason Radegas, Here at the Center of the World in Revolt (Anonymous edition, 2011), 78.

[120] I would agree with Fernand Braudel (The Perspective of the World [New York: Harper & Row, 1984]) and Giovanni Arrighi (The Long 20th Century) that capitalism, as a socioeconomic system, a strategy of accumulation adopted and expanded by states, emerged in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, though this marriage was preceded many centuries by a merchant class pursuing the same strategy on a much more limited scale. Arrighi (The Long 20th Century, 11) cites a study by Janet Abu-Lughod from Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) showing that the principal markets of Eurasia and Africa were already connected in the thirteenth century.

[121] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 76.

[122] Yuri E. Berezkin, “Alternative Models of Middle Range Society. ‘Individualistic’ Asia vs. ‘Collectivistic’ America?” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 69.

[123] L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin,” 289.

[124] Wikipedia “Tarumanagara,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarumanagara (accessed February 20, 2016).

[125] Ludomir R. Lozny, “The Transition to Statehood in Central Europe,” in The Early State, its Alternatives and Analogs, 283.

[126] Ibid., 285.

[127] Ibid., 283–84.

[128] See, for example, Alex Gorrion (“You don’t really care for music, do ya?,” The Anvil Review, July 21, 2011, http://theanvilreview.org/print/you-dont-really-care-for-music-do-ya/) on the importance of marginalized sectors of the population, immigrants and children, in the creation of language; John McWorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (New York: Gotham, 2009) on language; or “Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters” and more recently “From 15M to Podemos: The Regeneration of Spanish Democracy and the Maligned Promise of Chaos” (Anonymous, CrimethInc., March 3, 2016, http://crimethinc.com/texts/r/podemos/) on anarchist debates about a marginal or central participation in the occupation of Plaça Catalunya, Barcelona.

[129] Meaning a married couple goes to live with the woman’s family or with the man’s family, respectively.

[130] As Pierre Clastres noted, these are not strictly “extended families” in the Western sense, containing three generations descended from two common ancestors, but larger groupings in which blood relations might be loose or even fictive. To denote such a grouping, Clastres uses the term demos, suggested by Murdock, Society Against the State, 58–63.

[131] José Millalén Paillal, “La Sociedad Mapuche Prehispánica: Kimün, Arqueología y Etnohistoria,” in Pablo Marimán, Sergio Caniuqueo, José Millalén, and Rodrigo Levil, ¡…Escucha, winka…! Cuatro ensayos de Historia Nacional Mapuche y un epílogo sobre el futuro (Santiago de Chili: LOM Ediciones, 2006), 34. The subsequent observation about responsibilities comes from John Severino, “With Land, Without the State,” theanarchistlibrary.org, 2010, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-severino-with-land-without-the-state-anarchy-in-wallmapu.

[132] Clastres, Society Against the State, 62–65.

[133] Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961).

[134] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 276.

[135] Morton H. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967).

[136] We can also consider another model of social stratification, as found in capitalist societies. Without strong family groups or cultural cohesiveness within a class—which is to say, within an atomized society—capitalism must allow individuals the possibility of social mobility (not every individual, contrary to capitalist dogma, but many individuals). What is essentialized and naturalized in this model are not the social strata themselves (a member of the bourgeoisie, in theory, could end up being a proletarian, and vice versa) but the productive means that generate stratification and inequality.

[137] L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin,” 293.

[138] Dmitri D. Beliaev, “Classic Lowland Maya (AD 250–900)” in Civilizational Models of Politogenesis, 135.

[139] L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin,” 233.

[140] Richard Baum, “Ritual and Rationality: Religious Roots of the Bureaucratic State in Ancient China” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analog, 199.

[141] Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: The Free Press, 1947), 364, quoted in Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 205. Data in the rest of the paragraph is from Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 205–206.

[142] Bondarenko, “Kinship, Territoriality and the Early State Lower Limit,” 21.

[143] Ibid., 25.

[144] In my father’s family’s case, the event was the conquest of northern Netherlands by Napoleonic France. Previously, the farmers of the Groningen region only used first names. Well aware that the purpose of last names was social control, most obviously taxation, they registered a faint protest in their choice of surname: Penniless. In the even more rural province of Friesland, scatological and other joke names were a common choice by the peasants.

[145] Jianping Yi, “Non-Autocracy in Pre-Qin China,” in Social Evolution and History, 224–25.

[146] Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 209.

[147] Ibid., 210.

[148] Ibid., 211.

[149] Yi, “Non-Autocracy in Pre-Qin China,” 229.

[150] Beliaev, “Classic Lowland Maya (AD 250–900),” 136–38.

[151] Timothy K. Earle, “Hawaiian Islands (AD 800–1824)” in Civilizational Models of Politogenesis, 77.

[152] Ibid., 80.

[153] For more on the New Guinea highlanders or modern-day drop-out societies, see Gelderloos, Anarchy Works, particularly the chapter on technology.

[154] Earle, “Hawaiian Islands,” 79.

[155] Ibid., 74.

[156] Ibid., 80.

[157] Romila Thapar, A History of India, Vol. I. (New York: Penguin Books, 1966).

[158] Ibid., 38.

[159] Ibid., 37.

[160] Ibid., 40, 41.

[161] Ibid., 43.

[162] Ibid., 52.

[163] Ibid.

[164] Ibid., 53.

[165] R.L. Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science No. 169 (1970): 733–38, cited in Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 67.

[166] Randolph Bourne, The State, 1918, http://www.antiwar.com/bourne.php (accessed October 13, 2016).

[167] Fredy Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 66–68.

[168] Charles S. Spencer and Elsa M. Redmond, “Conquest Warfare, Strategies of Resistance, and the Rise of the Zapotec Early State,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 220–61.

[169] Ibid., 223.

[170] Ibid., 224.

[171] Ibid., 226–27.

[172] J. Marcus and K.V. Flannery, Zapotec Civilization: How Urban Society Evolved in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 139–40.

[173] Spencer and Redmond, “Conquest Warfare,” 230.

[174] Ibid., 234–35.

[175] Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, 141.

[176] H.T. Wright, “Recent Research on the Origin of the State,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6 (2009): 379–97; and Turnbull, The Forest People, Chapter 8.

[177] Just as the anti-globalization movement rightfully insisted that poverty should be measured with a complex array of factors and measurements that reflect well-being, as a way of disarming the manipulative metrics used by the World Bank, based only on monetary income, as true a measurement of human health as is possible with quantitative data cannot be reduced to mere lifespan but must also include frequency of disease and discomfort, mental health data, suicide rates, et cetera. Nonetheless, even if we only look at lifespan, pre-colonization hunter-gatherer societies probably still come out ahead if they are compared against the average for all modern scientific societies, and not only the richest of these, given that the relative good health (physical, not emotional) of the wealthiest countries is based on the exploitation and contamination of the poorest.

[178] Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 199.

[179] Emily Ahern, Chinese Ritual and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[180] Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 200. Baum is quoting C.A. Ronan and J. Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 187.

[181] Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 202, citing F.L.K. Hsu, Americans and Chinese: Passage to Differences, Americans and Chinese: Passage to Differences (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1981), 250–51.

[182] Max Weber, The Religion of China (New York: The Free Press, 1951), 30.

[183] Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 204–205.

[184] For example Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture; Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe, eds., Representations of Gender from Prehistory to Present (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

[185] L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States,” 294.

[186] Because the concept of equality is in its origins democratic, and as such patriarchal, and because it is also applied to patriarchal societies that have equalized access to power between men and women, I refer to the antithesis of a patriarchy as complementary gendered society. Ideally, the antithesis of patriarchy would be a society with absolutely no differentiation of gender or with a gender performativity that is constantly in flux. Clearly, gender differentiation is a prerequisite to patriarchy, and it seems that societies that make gender immutable are more likely to develop as patriarchies. However, this ideal seems to reach an incorporeal extreme that does not find expression in human history. Even societies with gender mutability and more than two gender categories were based, it seems, on the two primary genders common throughout the world. Even though the roles and characteristics of the genders differ, and postmodernism has long since problematized the assumption that categories are translatable, the two primary categories of gender seem to be universal. The characteristic that seems to be common in societies that are not patriarchal (including those that have been dubiously classified as matriarchal, even though they do not exhibit analogous control structures and customs) is a complementarity between the two gender categories, a balance based in respect and mutual autonomy, and possibly one or more additional categories that allow movement from the gender assigned at birth. This historical limitation, however, says nothing about the possibility of establishing a society with no gender differentiation now.

[187] Judith Van Allen, “Sitting On a Man,” Canadian Journal of African Studies II (1972): 211–19.

[188] Examples include Benin and Nupe kingdoms. Moses, the mythical figure important in the creation of Israelite states, who was according to different versions fostered by or a son of an Egyptian noble family, makes for a striking parallel.

[189] Bondarenko, “From Local Communities to Megacommunity,” 329–30.

[190] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 275.

[191] Yawar Nina, quoted in Severino, “The Other Gods Were Crying.”

[192] L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin,” 293.

[193] Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 198–99.

[194] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 226–34.

[195] Beliaev, “Classic Lowland Maya (AD 250–900),” 135.

[196] Baum, “Ritual and Rationality,” 203–204.

[197] Vladimir V. Emelianov, “The Ruler as Possessor of Power in Sumer,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 182, 184.

[198] Ibid., 184.

[199] Wikipedia “Tiwanaku Empire,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwanaku_empire (accessed February 20, 2016).

[200] Dmitri B. Proussakov, “Early Dynastic Egypt: A Socio-Environmental/Anthropological Hypothesis of ‘Unification,’” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogs, 140.

[201] Ibid., 145–46.

[202] Ibid., 165.

[203] Ibid., 147.

[204] Ibid., 148, 151.

[205] Ibid., 163.

[206] Michael Balter, “Farming Was So Nice, It Was Invented at Least Twice,” Science (July 4, 2013).

[207] Simone Riehl, Mohsen Zeidi, and Nicholas J. Conard, “Emergence of Agriculture in the Foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran,” Science 341 (July 5, 2013): 65–67.

[208] Balter, “Farming Was So Nice, It Was Invented at Least Twice.”

[209] Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover Magazine (May 1987): 64–66.

[210] Riehl, Zeidi, and Conard, “Emergence of Agriculture in the Foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran.”

[211] David Derbyshire, “Most Britons descended from male farmers who left Iraq and Syria 10,000 years ago,” Daily Mail, January 20, 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1244654/Study-finds-Britons-descended-farmers-left-Iraq-Syria-10-000-years-ago.html.

[212] Additional research supports this hypothesis: it turns out that genetic analysis shows that the earliest samples of domesticated wheat originated from within thirty-two kilometers of Göbleki Tepe site (Manfred Heun, Ralf Schäfer-Pregl, Dieter Klawan, Renato Castagna, Monica Accerbi, Basilio Borghi, and Francesco Salamini “Site of Einkorn Wheat Domestication Identified by DNA Fingerprinting,” Science 278 [November 14, 1997]: 1312–14.).

[213] Clastres, Society Against the State, 206–207.

[214] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 276.